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.
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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.
