Freeform or Systems?
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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.
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@Coin said in Freeform or Systems?:
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.
100%. And that’s why my personal feeling is to rely on filtering rather than stats. A player who barges through a scene flexing will usually reign it in after a quiet conversation with them explaining the issue. The ones that don’t rapidly find that nobody wants to play with them.
