Freeform or Systems?
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I like systems, to the extent that they support the story and the players and encourage RP. I like the element of random chance that dice bring, I like that +sheets force people to pick what their character is good at and what they’re not good at. To me RP is improv and the system/dice is one of several things giving you new prompts to improv with. I like that.
My forays into MUCK RP and Discord RP where there were no systems were not satisfying to me. A little bit of “you can’t fight this character because it is IC for me that I never lose so you will die,” lots of “I got you” “nuh uh, no you didn’t” like kids playing, and lots and lots of characters who are the best psycho killer in the entire universe at every single weapon that there is AND the best at persuasion and social skills AND the best pilot AND the best mechanic AND the best doctor, etc. I think that stays on the rails a little more with a +sheet/dice.
Many of my friends have long experience with freeform games wherein the players all seem to have been pretty mature and did accept losses/failures, did pick a lane for their skills, etc. I just personally don’t have that experience, so “at least some mechanical systems” is my personal preference.
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It depends on who I’m playing with. If it’s someone (or a group of someones) who I’m in sync with on a roleplay level and who I’ve established a baseline level of trust with, then there’s a lot to be said for freeform. I enjoy adding some randomness into the success/fail decisionmaking process using dice, because fairly often this ends up generating a result that’s interesting and fun to play that I might not have opted for if I eliminated dice/cards/RPS/etc. entirely – but under these circumstances then I’m happy to do things freeform. No need to roll dice for every little thing, you know?
When I don’t have that, it’s useful to me to have some game mechanics to fall back on that put some level of restriction on the ability of players to bigfoot any and every challenge that comes by. That doesn’t always happen even with game mechanics; we’ve all witnessed that one person who absolutely insists on handling everything they’re even remotely qualified for rather than occasionally cede the spotlight to someone else. But it does seem to make it a little less frequent?
Of course, whether I’m playing system-light or system-heavy I will inevitably end up creating all sorts of additional details surrounding the characters I write up, to the degree that the game permits it. Extended families, in-character organizations, backstory details that I didn’t think to include in the character creation phase, subcultures that the character’s part of, stuff about where they came from if it’s a fantasy or sci-fi game – I’m an inveterate backstory expander. But that doesn’t seem to me to be so much system-dependent as setting-dependent (or maybe staff-dependent), since I’ve gone off on wild tangents of this sort even in games that use World of Darkness or D20 as their RPG system.
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Both?
I like to improv into a scene and see what happens. I like to be able to write a story without saying X attempts to … then wait the roll to continue. Although, I value the roll system too for people who never want to lose. That just becomes no fun.
Also, I like to randomize things. Let’s see if I fail X. Do we go left or right, looks like the dice say this…
I like the combination. Which means this post was super unhelpful, but I guess it’s just what mindset I’m in for the day.
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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.
