For years I was on a quest. Like the mythical King Pellinore I was compelled to hunt for an elusive beast, occasionally finding the odd track or catching the fleeting glimpse of my quarry through mist shrouded woods. Sometimes I would find others along my journey who would tell me of seeing this creature as it passed them by and who would give me directions on where I could find it, but inevitably when I arrived I would find that they were mistaken and what they had seen was not the beast I sought.
So I gave up, and in doing so I came to realize the reason I could never catch my questing beast was because it simply didn’t exist.
The quest was for the mythical ‘Perfect System’, a set of rules that would easily allow campaigns in any setting and style. It could handle super heroes, kung-fu films, sci-fi, medieval fantasy, or whatever other idea I had come up with that week. Basically what I was trying to design was GURPS before there was GURPS.
Initially I started off with the Hero Games system. At the time it consisted of Champions and Espionage with Pulp Hero soon joining the list. The system was already shown to be fairly flexible and in fact in later years was released as a more generic system, though with heavy emphasis on its superhero roots. GURPS, in fact, appears to be largely based around ideas that came from Hero Games.
Even better the game had two big features which really appealed to me. The first was that character creation wasn’t random. If I wanted to make a wizard then I could make a wizard without having to rely upon the luck of random dice rolls. Even better I could decide to make a very intelligent but frail wizard or a slightly less intelligent wizard, but one better able to withstand being knocked about.
The second feature which appealed to me was that its combat had depth. No longer did you simply roll initiatives and then roll to hit, hoping to wear away your opponent before they could wear you down. Now you had the option to attempt to block your opponent or dodge their attack. When you attacked in turn you could launch a regular attack or sacrifice some of your chance to hit to launch a more powerful attack. Attacks would inflict both lethal damage, which was slow to recover, and non-lethal damage, which recovered much faster. Characters could become stunned or fatigued as the battle went on. The possibilities seemed endless.
Unfortunately the system, like any other, had its own slight flaws. A novice with a hand gun did as much damage as a marksman whenever they would hit their target. Since a marksman was far more likely to strike in the center of mass than a novice this was a bit of a problem. Some tweaks to the rules could be done to help the marksman a little bit but they would pose their own problem. Targeting another character’s chest meant no more winging of the target but it actually decreased the chance of hitting, this despite the fact that modern shooters are trained to shoot at the center of mass because it makes a hit more likely.
Even worse, the system showed aspects of its roots as a superhero game. Even the most skilled sniper with a military issue sniping rifle shooting a character in the head would be unlikely to kill them outright. Even with the large bore sniping rifles such as the Barret .50 the odds of an outright kill was only 50/50 or so, and we aren’t even discussing the shooting of player characters who are generally regarding as being a step above the teaming masses (they are the heroes of the story, after all) but rather this was the rank and file shopkeepers and accountants who had the strong possibility of surviving such attacks.
Many other annoyances were also inherent in the system. Breaking someone’s arms and legs would be fatal without medical intervention. It was possible, though admittedly unlikely, to kill an injured person by breaking their finger. A target who was woozy could be knocked unconscious by a kick in the shins from a small child.
Along came the Blacksburg Tactical Research Center. They published several games such as Warp World, Spacetime, and Time Lords. Their system, though complicated, did an exquisitely good job of modeling combat regardless of the form. It could be used for two knights fighting each other with broadswords or two people in body armor shooting at each other with hand guns. It was able to deal with a person shooting a hand gun fighting a knight in armor without any alterations to the stats. The system took into account the skill of the attacker, allowing them to do more damage through better placed shots, and the skill of the defender, allowing them to reduce damage by causing more hits to be grazing.
Even better it was possible to break both arms and legs of an opponent without killing them while being impossible (or practically so) to knock out a target with a kick to the shins. This didn’t mean a good solid kick to the shins didn’t accomplish anything. The pain it caused could temporarily affect the target, making them unable to attack or defend, or could have longer term effects as the target was forced to hobble around on a sore or even broken leg.
In short the system seemed almost perfect. It only had one flaw:
It was too accurate.
It was completely unable to adapt to campaigns in which more suspension of disbelief was more important than accuracy. Superhero campaigns went right out the window. Even a superhero who had low levels of super-strength would tend to kill people with a punch. Spiderman, a character able to stop a speeding train, punching Doctor Octopus, a guy who was essentially a normal human being with four metal arms stuck on his body, in the face? Not only was the fight immediately over but there was no potential for a rematch, at least not in this world.
And it wasn’t simply limited to the superhero genre. Campaigns based around ideas such as vampires, who were far too weak to do something as impressive as stop a train, wouldn’t hold up because if you gave them ‘only’ enough strength to do things such as crack (crack, not shatter) a brick wall with a strike of their fist the damage they would inflict with a single punch would be horrific.
It was at that point that I realized the futility of my quest. It simply wasn’t possible to make a system that could handle such a wide range of possibilities, and it wasn’t an issue with some inability to understand a concept or model a system. It was because different campaign setting would contradict each other. In one campaign setting it would be important to be accurate but in another it became just as important not to be accurate.
So what is the purpose of this rather long winded monologue as I stroll down memory lane? It’s to illustrate a point and that point is that it is impossible to create a game system that everyone will like. Just like different campaigns would have different goals as far as how combat should be simulated so to will different players have different goals in what they want their game to recreate. It’s impossible not because of issues such as when does the system become too complex for enjoyment but rather it is impossible simply because different people will have different goals they want the system to fill.
As an example assume there are three players; Alice, Brian, and Charlie. Charlie is a fan of heroic fiction and so wants a system which can create the epic combats of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero, Conan. Charlie wants to be able to take on a hundred men and snatch victory from almost certain defeat as Charlie’s character emerges at the end of the battle battered and bloody (because where’s the excitement if the character is so much better than the hundred enemies that they can never land a blow) but ultimately victorious.
Brian, on the other hand, wants realism. He wants a world in which death is only a sword stroke away at any moment. The entire world is exciting because even the clumsiest peasant could get lucky and inflict a mortal wound because that’s reality. He’s forced to remain alert and crafty, unable to simply watch a hit point bar as it is whittled away, knowing that he is safe until his hit points get down to the last twenty percent or so. Combat is an intricate dance of parry and thrust, maneuvering for position until at last he can slip past his opponents guard to inflict a fatal blow.
Last of all is Alice, who also wants realism. The difference between Alice and Brian, however, is that Alice works for the FBI compiling various reports concerning shootings, stabbings, and other unpleasant things people do to one another. As a result Alice has a very keen grasp of the reality of things such as a sword fight and is aware that when the victor slips past his opponents guard he rarely inflicts a fatal wound. Rather the wound tends to be debilitating to the opponent giving the victor a huge advantage which typically results in more debilitating wounds being inflicted. Often it is only after several of these have been inflicted that a fatal blow occurs.
It simply is not possible to create a system that will give all three of our players what they want. Charlie and Alice have almost opposite goals. Charlie knows that the system that he or she wants isn’t realistic but doesn’t care. For Charlie being able to have these epic encounters is far more important that realism. Charlie is interesting in creating grand stories and realism rarely leads to those. Alice and Bob find such a world a bit silly but even they cannot agree. Bob, who thinks he wants realism still wants a slightly romanticized view of it. Taking on a hundred foes and being victorious is over the top for him but fighting three men at once and only succeeding through incredible talent and a bit of luck, that’s perfect. Of course for Alice even that doesn’t really work. She’s a purist and know the truth about what a sword fight would look like and even Bob’s Count of Monte Cristo world is just too much for her.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us in something of a Min-Max problem. Any system that is designed will have detractors, people who feel the system doesn’t do what they want it to do. As new games are released there seems to be a tendency towards more and more complicated systems as designers search for the elusive ‘Perfect System’ that will have no detractors.
While there is nothing wrong with complexity or attempting to more accurately simulate things from the real world we need to realize that it isn’t a goal in and of itself. Instead what we need to aim for is a system that will have the broadest appeal with the smallest negative aspects.
In our above example the best solution is probably to make a game similar to what Bob wants. While this will not give Alice and Charlie exactly what they are looking for they may be somewhat mollified. After all, the system is at least closer to reality for Alice. Fights aren’t simply a matter of trying to grind down your opponents hit points faster than they can grind down yours. Charlie may not be happy that it isn’t possible to fight a hundred men and will but may be somewhat mollified by the ability to take on three or four at once and come out victorious. After all, that’s still bigger than life, just not as big as Charlie was hoping for.
Does this mean that games have to tend towards the bland? Not necessarily. It is still possible to make a system like what Alice or Charlie want (though there is almost certainly more money to be made in Charlie’s world than Alice’s). However such a system is designed that way because those are the stories that the MMO wants to create.
The systems of Charlie’s world don’t have to be simple. They could be wonderfully complex and convoluted. However any such things should always be done with the intent of creating Charlie’s world and not with the intent of somehow making a ‘Perfect System’.