Freeform or Systems?
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It depends on the people I’m RPing with. If it’s either of my regular RL groups, freeform is fine. If it’s a game with a bunch of relative strangers, I’d rather have some sort of structure to the task resolution and character sheets. I’ve had several bad experiences in the past with freeform games with strangers (a PBEM and a couple of forum games) go absolutely haywire because everybody had a different interpretation of how capable given characters were.
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Systems add impartiality (and wonderful randomness!) to conflict and challenge. I’ve been doing freeform lately and I’m really not a fan because all it takes is one powerplayer with an ego to muck it up for everyone else.
If everything goes right and everyone is trustworthy and willing to write collaboratively towards a common end goal of a great encounter, yeah sure freeform is good. But when Barry Supervillain says “nuh uh I am an expert in your kung fu ways so I instantly win” and the dice rolls otherwise, well, numbers don’t lie.
I may be getting cynical lol.
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I am pro-system for almost anything not at my dining room table. If I can’t pelt you with dice, meeples, pencils, or wads of paper for being a nuisance or coming up with inane drivel, I want some rules in place to govern our characters’ interactions.
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I like a mix of both - dice for resolution of your stuff, but stick some narrative-bending things in the dice. Prime examples here are the FFG dice, both the Genesys rules and L5R.
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I want a robust system that lets me do Cool Things. I’ve been trying out various system-light games over the last couple of years, and even in a tabletop environment, I really want a game where I know what resources I have, what skills make my character unique, and a bit of randomness to keep the tension high.
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I wonder how well Index Card RPG could translate to MU*. It’s been my favorite tabletop system for years because it is sufficient to distinguish your character and handle power scales while also staying out of the way and being blessedly lightweight.
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@Pyrephox I highly recommend Legend in the Mist. It’s light- to medium-weight and very narrative. My group now uses it almost exclusively, regardless of genre. We’ve used it for fantasy (both horror and more traditional), sci-fi (Star Wars and Transformers), and as a replacement for WoD. The best thing about it is that most of these “hacks” require little to no work. The most we did was add more “might” scales for Transformers to represent the huge difference between humans and robots.
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as someone who played and staffed on an x-men-derived, OC-heavy game with freeform powers for years back in the day…
…i wouldn’t want to go back to appstaffing those lol. it got so exhausting defining limits. i think i’d like SOME sort of system framework nowadays.
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I think it would be help to clarify the distinction between the two. How many rules are needed before a “freeform” game is now a “system” game? It might be something like the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity “I know it when I see it,” but it might be helpful to roughly delineate the boundaries, because I consider rules-lite RPGs to still be a system. If a book is being used to run a game, even if it’s only 10 pages, that’s a system to me. Whereas, kids playing cops and robbers in the backyard is freeform.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous To me, a system is some sort of mechanics ruling for abilities/powers/etc. that gives some fairness/stability to the game.
It could be as simple as ‘any time you want to do something requiring a roll, roll a D6 and if you get a 5 or 6 you succeed’. Or it could be something as complex as I hear that FATAL system.
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I need the restriction of a system, and even then I get paralysed by choice more often than I’d care to reflect on. If I can be anything, I end up being nothing.
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@Ominous when i staffed on a mutant/superpowers game with freeform powers, we had no system. there was no dice and no rolling. there was no book. powers were defined by writing them out and defining whatever limits needed to be defined for that power, with the overall power level of the game just being controlled by the humans doing approvals.
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Parameters are important, but it harshes my vibe when poses take a backseat to a wall of dice roll output.
ETA: It’s also totally chill that crunchy mechanics are some folks’ happy place. We can play different places.
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@Roz my anxiety shot through the roof reading this.
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@helvetica said in Freeform or Systems?:
We can play different places.
No, we must all play on the singular Uber-Game.
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@catzilla said in Freeform or Systems?:
This question/curiosity came about in the superhero and Star Wars threads. (Some) people said freeform superhero is great but a freeform Star Wars game is ICK?
I was one of the people you’re referencing from the Star Wars thread and it really does just boil down to the ground everyone else has already covered, for me.
I like light systems, I like crunchy systems. freeform is something I engaged with when I was much younger, but years of exposure to enormously unfun strangers make the thought of joining a freeform game in the year of our lord 2026 incredibly unappealing, regardless of genre.
I also just enjoy the “game” aspect of roleplaying games. interacting with cleverly designed mechanics is fun and interesting to me.
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For Excelsior! (and Better Tomorrow) I worked out a sort of tier/scale system for powers/skills but it was mostly more of a guide as to what was possible; the system itself was still consent-based freeform.
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The more creative freedom I have, the happier I am. I’ve invented entire cultures/societies with a bit of an amateur conlang on games that let me
With you 100% there. This is a hobby with a lot of different corners to it and they’re all equally valid, but I’m very much in the collaborative storytelling corner. To me the idea that there’s a better story to tell but we can’t tell that one because the dice said no makes little sense. I can get behind the occasional random element thrown in optionally, but to me the idea that’s a rule just makes it an unwelcome constraint.
We just implemented a transliterating markdown extension for the Doyle Kryptonian conlang on our game, and we’ve got a player with an OC who has done his own conlang who’s working on a font. If he can provide me with some reasonably easily computable transliteration rules for it I’ll have a go at adding that too. A bit crazy yes, but it’s fun, and that’s what this hobby is supposed to be after all.
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I think this would be a better approach than the more vague soft-limits people often go for, which just tend to cause more arguments if anything (“Blasto-Man has a strength level of 20 tons, it says so on the official website” “But in this iconic scene in Blasto-Man #274 he’d be generating 3978.6 kilonewtons of force…”)
The problem I have with any kind of stat system is what I call the Batman problem. Batman has shit stats compared to Captain Randomthrowawaycharacter and if you play to the stats, Batman becomes a joke,
I keep mooting the notion (as a thought experiment, I don’t think it would actually work) of a system which has one single stat: Narrative Weight. Want to app that one paper-thin character who once appeared in a Superman comic 30 years ago and was created purely to be a threat-of-the-week able to knock Superman around easily? Sure, go ahead. Narrative weight 1. She can knock Superman around easily for a while, but she’s always going to lose any important conflict.
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@Colette said in Freeform or Systems?:
I think this would be a better approach than the more vague soft-limits people often go for, which just tend to cause more arguments if anything (“Blasto-Man has a strength level of 20 tons, it says so on the official website” “But in this iconic scene in Blasto-Man #274 he’d be generating 3978.6 kilonewtons of force…”)
The problem I have with any kind of stat system is what I call the Batman problem. Batman has shit stats compared to Captain Randomthrowawaycharacter and if you play to the stats, Batman becomes a joke,
I keep mooting the notion (as a thought experiment, I don’t think it would actually work) of a system which has one single stat: Narrative Weight. Want to app that one paper-thin character who once appeared in a Superman comic 30 years ago and was created purely to be a threat-of-the-week able to knock Superman around easily? Sure, go ahead. Narrative weight 1. She can knock Superman around easily for a while, but she’s always going to lose any important conflict.
That’s why any game I run promotes joint narrative storytelling; Batman doesn’t become a joke because everyone works to make Batman be Batman. I also typically do not allow villains and any PvP is strictly plot-dependent.
