After Hours: Fates Worse Than Bad Design
Added 2017-08-07 21:21:26 +0000 UTCMost RPGs are terrible at information design. Sections are split up for no discernible reason, key elements are hidden away in blocks of text, and indexes are non-existent or terrible. We went over 3 books to analyze why they are so bad and why game designers would do this:
Fates Worse Than Death by Brian St. Claire King
Street Fighter Player's Guide by Andrew Lucas
Song: Nod if You Can Hear Me by HOME
Comments
So i wanna touch on something Ross and others missed the thing that really just sends it over the top and seals the deal for how awful can this book be. This involves Fates Worse Than Death and 1 little awful thing. I'm talking about Golem's and anyone that doesn't know this is your big warning I suggest you stop reading now its.... its messed up. Again a second warning this stuff isn't for the faint of heart. Its me giving a Trigger Warning because this stuff gets messed up. So whats so horrible about this 'Golem'? I dunno the fact its a pretty much a lobotomized person that you then install a muse into. So a reminder this is a setting without backups or cortical stacks so you are deleting a person killing them to install a little digital friend into the body to keep it running. So how could this get worse? We are already killing people to make them your servant. Well 'Golems' are built, with 3 specific parts; 1 where you get the body... all the horrific squick 2; the type of Muse you install from combat to servant to... 3; The type of body. Which together isn't creepy enough because they give the price point for all of these options. And that is when i knew this hole went further as one of the goods the trader class can deal in is 'Golems' Seriously who the hell thought of that and said he this is ok its the most freaky thing lets just casually include that in our game! That is the worst part it is just treated as being so casually included.
DiploRaptor(Samuel)
2019-03-04 12:14:06 +0000 UTCAnd now that I'm thinking about this subject again, I'm remembering my earliest experience with bad information design in an rpg: The AD&D Player's Handbook. One of the first things I wanted to do when my friends and I discovered D&D in '84 was to create my own character, so I borrowed a copy of the player's handbook and started reading. One of the first things I was told to do was to assign stats that I had generated using one of the systems described in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Even at the age of 10 I knew this was bullshit.
Bryan Rombough
2017-09-17 16:14:48 +0000 UTCOh, and a comment I meant to make earlier: You attributed the heavy use of references to different parts of the text in some of your examples to "stream of consciousness writing" but I think it's really the opposite; the author trying to organize the text after writing the rough draft, and doing a poor job. An example of "stream of consciousness writing" I am reminded of is some of the Conan d20 books from Mongoose. I briefly played in a campaign about a decade ago and I still remember being horribly frustrated with those books. It was obvious that the text was little more than a rough draft that had been given a cursory proofreading and no real editing. There were little 'nuggets' of rules strewn throughout the text without any thought to organization. Want to know if your character's race gets any bonuses to skill rolls? you won't find that in the description of the race in the character creation chapter, those bits of information are scattered throughout the chapter describing that race's history & society, clearly written down as the author thought them up and then never collated into the actual rules text.
Bryan Rombough
2017-09-15 20:41:04 +0000 UTCYeah, and I think the more technical approach to writing wargame rules makes sense since they're even more 'reference documents' than RPG rules (or perhaps it's just that my introduction to gaming was through wargames in the 80's).
Bryan Rombough
2017-09-15 20:01:50 +0000 UTCRPG writing came from designers who started by writing historical war game rules and precedence is a hell of a thing.
Ross Payton
2017-09-13 21:16:07 +0000 UTCListening to this podcast again, and when the "this reads like VCR instructions" comment was made, I was reminded of the popular adage "rpg writing is technical writing" and of the technical & legal texts I sometimes deal with at work where nearly every article has a reference to some other part of the text and/or words defined in the glossary. This made me think that many rpg writers are trying to imitate that style of "serious" technical writing on complex subjects, written for a specialized audience. And often doing so poorly when it just isn't necessary.
Bryan Rombough
2017-08-23 12:04:18 +0000 UTCThe original president and artistic director of Dream Pod 9 was a professional graphic designer for over 10 years before co-founding a game company.
Bryan Rombough
2017-08-10 23:14:46 +0000 UTCOne of the best game lines, design-wise, was Heavy Gear by Dream Pod 9. The worst: Pretty much anything by GDW - they had brillant game worlds and the worst design and game testing.
Fluxington
2017-08-09 15:07:09 +0000 UTCPretty sure the entire thought process went: "Street fighter is awesome, let's license it for an RPG. Okay, how should it work? Well, we already have this system..."
Barac Wiley
2017-08-09 01:15:25 +0000 UTCI've read a free version of Fates Worse Than Death and forgot about it until now. Shaun left out how Shut-Ins are a huge demographic of people addicted to VR who never leave their homes, which is somehow a viable option in a crime-ridden hellhole. I actually like a lot of the ideas in the game, including the mundane plot threads, but now that I have Red Markets I realize how badly it fumbled at being a horror game about living in poverty.
Jane Wayland
2017-08-08 17:41:50 +0000 UTC"Croc Maga" should have been Jacques' martial art.
Timothy Connelly
2017-08-08 04:58:24 +0000 UTCYeah we'll follow up with more Street Fighter in future episodes. It's too wack not to discuss.
Ross Payton
2017-08-07 22:01:15 +0000 UTCPalladium is super guilty of this too, even today. Anywho! Great episode, you guys rock as always. Tom and Street Fighter hit a great topic there, RPGs that have horrifically mismatched systems. Street Fighter with the Storytelling System? What?! That is worse than D20 Cthulhu, who thought that system could support an elaborate martial arts system?
Gary R
2017-08-07 21:44:09 +0000 UTC
