Today I was reading some of the out of print Shadowrun sourcebooks I got from backing the latest SR Returns Kickstarter. I was reading Field of Fire and got all misty eyed at all the weapons they had implemented and how 80s-licious they were.

I started looking at the damage codes, though, and reflected how in SR1, it wasn't Power and Damage, but you also had a third number, which was how many successes would be needed to reduce the damage by one level.

I noticed how the submachineguns and the military pattern rifles had very similar damage codes, with the SMGs being just one Power point lower. (After looking up cavitation and penetration differences between rifle and pistol rounds, what are these SMGs firing? .454 Casull?? According to http://www.rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/methods.html .454 Casull 360 gr Cor-Bon FN Penetrator had 45 inch penetration in ballistic testing.)

I began to think how in real life, if you wanted to really implement classic or 80s-type submachineguns firing pistol cartridges versus military pattern rifles firing rifle cartridges, you'd want to differentiate them a lot more. You'd want to think about armor penetration, cavitation, the weight and dimensions of the weapon, and stuff like the intensity of the recoil. If it were just Power and Damage everyone should be running around with a big rifle.


I kind of feel like today, there's no reason for a RPG system to not be as detailed as possible when it comes to modeling things like firearms handling or wounding and incapacitation. As long as we're talking about something that can be mathematically modeled, all you need to do is write some software to crunch the numbers and the results can be generated immediately at the gaming table if you have a laptop, tablet, or similar.

The classic argument against high levels of detail used to be that it bogged down the game or made things too cumbersome. But seemingly that should be an invalid argument today. To me, how satisfying would it be to have incapacitation stats based on available real world statistics? How satisfying would it be to have a melee combat roll take into account whether the guy getting punched was hampered by an awkward longarm or not? In my opinion, with a little bit of planning, why not have all these things taken into account and more? All you have to do is think of it ahead of time and write a computer program to do all the calculations.

I feel like it would create so much more character differentiation and stuff to learn about or research when designing the campaign.

That being said I also hear lots of people complain about SR3 rules as being too complicated. How many people hear me, and how many think I'm nuts?

I'll preface this with a tl;dr version of what I have to say:
KISS.

Longer answer: While I do often appreciate the attempt at representing believable "real world" mechanics, a game tends to break down at certain levels of complexity, or not happen at all.
Certainly, there are individuals who want to model highly complex circumstances in a game, but the average tends towards wanting a simple and approachable pastime. This means that most people do not want to extensively research what kind of weapon is best in which situation, or how deadly a blow to the head really is as opposed to just stunning.

I'll address some of your points directly:

I don't see why it should be invalid. Cumbersome is cumbersome, independent of the when and how.


For me, not at all satisfying, and a lot of headache. I don't just casually write computer programs or research all manner of subjects before really starting to play (and I guess that most people don't do that either). People usually want low barriers for their free time fun, not highly complicated preparations before the fun starts.
Similarly, a game needs to fulfill a few requirements, such as being able to play it with a minimum of equipment, e.g. a piece of paper, a pen, and dice. I already substitute all (or most) of these things with a tablet, but the apps for that aren't self-written but rather widely available.

To wit: If I shoot at someone in an RPG setting, I want to have a quickly calculable inkling of what will happen. I can easily take into account visibility and other similar modifiers, but when it starts to incorporate dozens of variables like sun glare, wind speed, cavitation, et al. it becomes tedious.

In conclusion, I'd say that I applaud such efforts, but the baseline should be the average player, not gun enthusiasts

Well, I disagree. Not much has changed really. The primary problems with overcomplexity still apply.


No, the problem isn't calculating Thresholds and damage. The problem is chasing down all modifiers. Your app doesn't help there if it does the calculations; unless you never made it through basic maths, the calculations required for most games are just about as quickly done with a calculator and a sheet of paper as with an app. It's checking up on all the appling modifiers and rules for the current situation in-game that takes so much time. This can be mitigated a bit by introducing miniatures, but even then, things will still move at a snail's pace, and not for the calculations but or finding out what to calculate in the first place. A comprehensive, three-dimensional, very adaptable and user-friendly encounter simulator would go a ver long way there, but I doubt that's something you (or anybody) just casually whips up in an evening coding session.


It would be rather frustrating, I'd say, because characters would die like flies.


How so? The lion's share of bogging down - chasing all the modifiers, and discussing them at length until player and GM agree - would still apply. whether you enter the numbers into a calculator or into an app is not going to change much.

I agree with what hermit said: even if your program took everything into account, you'd need to feed it the data, and that would take time.
You can reduce that time with a good interface: a program that knows which weapon and bullets each character uses (and can even track down usage and maintenance), can be setup with pre-defined setting ("med-range fight in a street at night/CQC in night club"), but even then you still need to give many inputs manually.

You also need to have a visual representation, for stuff like cover, distance, visibility, etc. And with such a representation, you infringe on imagination and the freedom that a less-defined world can offer. When you have no visual representation, a player can ask if there's a nearby bench he can take to bash people's head with. The GM can decide on the fly if there is one or not and "add it" in the world at no cost.
With a visual representation that's used to handle everything, you make it harder for a player to imagine there might be a bench there, and even if the player decides to introduce that concept, it will need to be added in the computer interface.

There are ways to improve games with computer tools, but while there can be a wholly computer-based tabletop RPG, it won't be the same as a PnP RPG.

Besides, I'm not even sure having a perfectly realistic simulator is desirable. First of all, getting something that is really working well for stuff like firefights probably isn't easy. Paradoxically a more complex simulation might sometimes be less close to the real stuff than a very abstract simulation. Second, it might get in the way of a good story. When your system is abstract, the GM can decide whether that bullet hit the arm, the leg or the chest depending on what is best for the story. If the computer tells that it's the splanch, then the splanch it is, no matter how boring that might be.

Simple.

I tried playing Earthdawn, because I mean come on, that whole world sounds amazing and weird and fun to explore. Ran a couple premade adventures with friends, slogged through the first one in twice the time we thought it would take, started the second one and it became clear this was going to be even worse, walked away and never looked back.

I can understand why old school dungeon crawlers were popular once, but we no longer live in an era of having nothing else to do. There are too many other worthwhile things we could be doing with our time nowadays, and we're simply not gonna want to play for ten hour marathon sessions, particularly when most of that time is spent churning through boring, repetitive combat.

---

There's also just the fact that even the most in-depth simulation simply cannot be as flexible or as powerful as human imagination. And in a game about collective storytelling - which I honestly believe is the absolute core of tabletop gaming - the rules exist only to service the group's ability to tell their stories, and tell them well. When the rules get in the way of that, they're no longer worth having.

~Umi

I do like deep systems, even complicated, but not a true simulations. That's what defines a great game system to me.

For exemple, I d rather have one weapon with less damages but better armor penetration but another one beeing more discrete and so on.

That adds depth to the game.


What doesn't would be to have 3-4 similar SMG with one having better stats (even if realistic). Everyone would pick that one. Il doesn't add any depth.

I personnaly do not like simple systems. I like deep ones which doesn't necessarely means realistic ones.

*cough-hack-Rainforest-Carbine!*

~Umi

The simple.

My go to game these days is Apocalypse World for this exact reason. I just endure playing Shadowrun because we didn't find a good adaptation yet for it (though I'm seriously looking at Sixth World).

Complexity varies depending on the temperament of players for games I run.

For some, I do a pretty fast-and-loose GURPS system. 3D6 everywhere, don't calculate anything, run by the seat of the pants. I have to work hard on maintaining flavour, but that's my problem.

I am a fan of Hackmaster 5. Yes, it's a bit crunchy, but it's pretty darned explicit about precalculating stuff so that when you're in a huge combat with 25 participants and gore and blood splattering everywhere, it still moves quickly. It's abstract enough that it lets me say: "Your trick worked, the orc didn't expect that, you get +3 on your roll, now do it."

I do like relatively simple rules which pile on each other in elegant ways to make for complex outcomes. The best, bar none, which I saw in that line was the magic rules for Mage: The Ascension (original flavour, or maybe 2nd Ed. After that they just got stupid and lost the plot).

I am intrigued by the ability for people to use smartphones and tablets to do a lot of the scutwork and I would applaud a system which worked on the theory that the people around the table have tablets, or at least phablets. A slick, searchable ruleset. Precalculation of rolls. Even something where a GM could sync everyone, and send them with a poke: roll for *blah* and get it back. Technocratic? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Embrace the power.

The benefit would be low cognitive load on the players, easy entry into the system, easy rule setup, and easy integration with a whole series of graphics, maps, planning tools .... this idea has big legs, and would benefit from a system designed to exploit the possibilities.

Further there's the difficulty of the player modeling all these modifiers in their head when making decisions, as we're dealing with a described world rather than an observable one upon which they can make their own perceptions. In a computer game, this isn't a big deal, as the engine can offer clues to the in-world conditions. In a tabletop game, the GM has to provide all those indicators. This becomes a huge hassle very quickly.

For myself, I like crunchy games, but not so much on a simulationist level as on a gamesmanship level. I want options, and lots of them, without any one being obviously the One Best Way to win. I want players to be able to approach the game from different directions and still both be able to play on roughly the same level and have fun.

Suddenly it occurs to me that you could have instanced combat as in FFVI, and there's no real reason that couldn't work as a highly abstracted combat mechanic.

... complete with a victory fanfare and a sad Game Over sequence ...

Oh no! The dragon attacks! Fight, Item or Run?

simple, I've been looking at my old D&D books lately and there was something so easy in them. if you needed something you could wing it, now they are so dense it's clogged like stale arteries

I'm ok with an 'average complex' system sorta like GURPS or Palladium and then just building worlds around it. Now I'm not saying those systems are IDEAL, but there's a benefit to having a semi-static system even as you pick up new titles. I kinda liked the old MEGS and ...whatever the hell the Marvel system used, I can't recall its name.

The downside is that sometimes things get pushed into rule-coverage that doesn't quite make sense, but things stay more or less the same between editions/new material.

I think there is a market for that. Certainly Wargamers would find it appealing. But there are some things to consider. I'd say most of them have been mentioned already.

Frankly, what's being described almost ceases to be a PnP RPG with computer tools, and fades into the space of a computer game with a human operator. That's not a bad thing, just a shift in perspective. Everyone is basically playing the same computer game. You have the digital map with their characters, all their stats already entered. At the start of combat, the computer perfectly calculates everyone's speed and initiative order and presents it. It knows who has a line of sight on whom. It counts your bullets and gear weight, and how effective camouflage is. All of this can be as realistic as you please. But the players, with the GM at the helm, get to decide how things play out; if there's new factors that need to be added, or new pieces of landscape. If maybe that bad guy doesn't die, or maybe she will flee the field of battle even though she has full health. When that battle is done, you can transition the scene to your non-combat location, and the computer would just display maps or images while you do the RP portion.

I could see that as being a lot of fun, and would make gameplay much faster for hardcore and casual gamers alike.

I prefer simple. Complex can add some dimension to a game, but a lot of time it doesn't. It can be a complicated subsystem for something that will rarely come up, it can be a level of detail that bogs down combat or other fast-moving scenes, and often it isn't even that realistic.

Some levels of complexity in Shadowrun, I like. I like that there are so many different ways to optimize a character, all the fun gear and spells and adept powers. I like the tactical element in combat. Sometimes it bogs down, though. Run and Gun had a bit too many different kinds of actions, and illustrates that as you make things more complex, mistakes and inconsistencies can creep in. I don't like the Matrix rules, with grids and hidden nodes and overwatch score - I would rather be able to make one simple test to, say, brick someone's gun.

I will say that simple can also have the problem of ...well...any games of old, rules-lawyering and 'pulling shit because it wasn't defined clearly'. Complex often times tries to accommodate for that, but end up causing new potential gaps. I suppose in that regard simple has the benefit of 'the GM probably knows the system as well as you do and can smack you for being munchkini" Complex can lend to finding things out as you go, and having to make quick rules.