Author: Sérgio Mascarenhas (---.161.70)
Date: 06-22-2001 06:48
Let’s see if I understood your argument correctly. Your point is that among “the most fundamental questions of design”, “the first of these questions in what type of characters will appear in the game”. And next you move forward to present three basic types: Legends, heroes, and just plain folks. By design you mean mechanical design, in other words, the rule system.
I completely disagree with you on this. You see, in mechanical design terms it’s indiferent whether you plan to play legends, heroes or just plain folks. In any case you need to account for three possibilities:
ˇ PC power range. This is the power ranges of the PCs. Because of consistency, and not to unbalance the power relationship among different PCs (which may alienate the players playing less powerful characters), the game needs to have a defined power range for PCs.
ˇ Underpowered. This is for characters or entities (read NPCs) that are not a challenge for the PCs, at least individually. All of this mechanicswise, since they can be challenge if played intelligently.
ˇ Overpowered. This is for characters of entities (read NPCs) for which PCs are not a challenge. At least if the PCs act individualisticly. And all of this mechanicswise, since if the players play intelligently, they may find a way to defeat the overpowered character.
One may add crossover scales that fall in between PC power range / underpowered, and PC power range / overpowered.
Now, this is all we need to cather for in terms of mechanics. Your legend / hero / just plain folk scale does not concern the mechanics. It concerns the setting, or, to be more precise, the combination of setting and mechanics:
ˇ A Just Common Folks game is one where characters (either PCs or NPCs) fall within the PC power range.
ˇ An Heroes game is one where the PCs fall within the PC power range (by definition the PCs always fall within the PC power range), but the NPCs fall within the PC power range / underpowered level.
ˇ A Legends game is one where, once more, the PCs fall within the PCs power range, while the NPCs fall within the underpowered range.
As you can see, when we consider the things the way I presented there are two other possibilities we could take into account, namely the situations where the PCs have to deal with NPCs that are in principle overpowered when compared to them.
This leads me to chalenge one of the other things you take as granted: “ The matter of genre, for example, is not of major concern at the outset of actual mechanical design”.
This is simply not true. Genre is a key concern at the outset of actual mechanical design. Fantasy requires magic; sci-fi requires technology; horror requires psycology; supers require, umm, super powers. I could go on and on. What mechanics one needs to design is strictly dependent on genre. Up to the most basic mechanics, like attributes, skills, etc. Do we need a magic stat (like Power in BRP), or not? How do we balance different techical levels? In fact, genre affects the way we balance the different power ranges (as described above). In fantasy we need to consider overpowered creatures; in sci-fi overpowered technology; and so on. All of these mechanical issues arise because of genre.
Of course, you consider that “the existence of generic and universal rules sets show this to be so”, but the many criticisms made to such rule sets show that this is not so. They show that usually these sets are designed with a genre in mind, and next are expanded to include other genres. More often than not this expasion will find its limits, and we finish with good mechanics for the original genre, and mediocre mechanics for the added genres.
Notice that I’m thinking about trully universal sets, the ones that attempt to have a core that’s really shared in each and any genre. I mentionned BRP above. It does not fall into this characterization. The basic concepts (something that’s different from the basic rules) are present in all BRP-derived games. But the rules based on those concepts change from game to game.
Sérgio
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