Drunk, Prone & On Fire (Tactical Transparency)

The success of Old School Renaissance games has resulted in this happening a lot in mainstream forums:

Someone’s like “OSR games rule! Player skill! Sandboxy freedom!”

And so then because words like “skill” and “freedom” are coded as good and metal, everyone then tries to explain how whatever random game they like is actually secretly OSR. And then you have to be like “No, sorry Magical Owl-Touch Factory is a wonderful game but isn’t OSR” and you sound like you’re being gatekeepy and grumpy.

So it’s good to clarify things, to give us some verbal technology to talk about them:

An important concept in the way OSR-style system-agnostic player skill is encouraged in a tabletop RPG system is “Tactical transparency”.

Tactical transparency is the degree to which a common-sense idea that would be effective in the “real” situation that the game-fiction mimics would also be effective in the game.

If you need to know the system in order to be effective, the system has a low degree of tactical transparency. Magic: The Gathering has a low degree, Dread has a low degree (all risky actions are represented by pulling a Jenga block, so an idea is only as good as you are good at pulling blocks), Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has an decreasing degree of tactical transparency as you level up (feats and spells with obscure names and tricks with actions-per-round become increasingly important). You can be skilled at these games but that skill is system-specific, it requires system mastery.

If, on the other hand, common-sense tactics that seem to make sense in real life also make sense often in the game, the system has a high degree of tactical transparency. This is an OSR ideal.

Perfect tactical transparency is impossible and would be problematic anyway: first of all it’d require thousands of rules for things like chemistry and physics (our army’s steel swords beat your bronze ones!) which would take a long time to use and consult. But the point of OSR-style player skill is to be as tactically transparent as you can be while keeping the game playable and smooth: thus the requirement for a high-trust table where all players basically agree on the GM’s good judgment and are willing to speak up when they disagree.

So...

-Classic tactical transparency: a slow moving-monster with no distance attacks and no ticking clock (King Kong in the desert), so obviously you use missile weapons (it can’t hurt you but you can hurt it).

In many narrative systems, this wouldn’t matter—if you’re in a system where killing the monster is just a “Go Aggro” roll and it doesn’t matter whether you use a sword or crossbow, it doesn’t have a high degree of tactical transparency and so isn’t a system where player skill (or at least system-agnostic player skill) matters. Further, if thinking to use a distance weapon would only give you a +1 bonus, that is still a pretty low degree of tactical transparency--it's not giving you all the advantages you'd commonsensically have. In PBTA games, yes, fictional positioning can get you a "that won't work at all" or a "that auto-succeeds" but the whole range of options in-between is narrower, so it's less transparent. Keep reading if you don't understand.

-Fantasy tactical transparency: tactical transparency doesn’t have to be about plausibility. It can be about things that make sense by the fiction’s own rules, as long as they aren’t the just the system’s own rules. For example, one time I was playing with some people and they were trying to kill an OSR monster someone made up (Rules, Rolls, Roles) called the “Man of Wounds”. This guy is a man full of swords stabbed through him at every angle. The players keep bashing on him, landing attacks and spells, but he takes no damage.  They’re getting increasingly frustrated. Someone’s aunt is in the kitchen listening to us play—she doesn’t know the system, she probably hasn’t even seen an episode of Game of Thrones—she rolls her eyes and goes “Just pull out the swords”. They try it: the guy dies. If something works by trial and error in the fiction, that’s still tactically transparent because it required a common-sense tactic unrelated to the system: when faced with the unknown or fantastic, try different things to see what works. Trial and error is a legitimate real-world tactic.

-Vagueness works against tactical transparency. For example, World of Dungeons is not much of an OSR system since, for example, all the spells (regardless of what they’re called or “skinned” as) work the same way: they just do whatever you want and have an effectiveness number. There’s very little weighing of “Ok, well this is an area fire effect, so it will result in this while this is a single-target ice effect so it will have this other result, so in this case…” . The system is not asking you to think with much tactical depth because a lot of your decisions don’t matter. You aren't deciding when a bomb is better than a beam or whether the clear advantage of the bomb is worth wasting now before you get to the boss because you get fewer bombs than beams, etc. Different kinds of games are about the different kinds of thinking they involve you in.

-Limited scales of bonus and penalty work against tactical transparency. Meaning like: if you can only get a +1 maximum due to clever fictional positioning, period, then that limits how much tactical thinking you have to do. For example, in an early draft of 5th edition D&D, it was rare to get a worse modifier than just “Disadvantage” —two disadvantage conditions stacked didn’t matter. And, in addition, being drunk granted disadvantage but also gave a minor bonus (it made you inured to pain or something, if I remember?) so it was literally better in that version of the game to be defending while simultaneously drunk, prone, and on fire than it was to just be defending while prone. If you're not the Human Torch and setting you on fire doesn’t put me at an advantage over you, the system is lacking in tactical transparency.

-When a system-specific tactic competes in effectiveness with a common-sense tactic that works against tactical transparency: like Apoc World’s rule that you get bonuses that make you more effective the more you have sex with the “Angel” PC means a tactic nobody would think up unless they’d read the book (bonus mining via fucks) is a way better way to win a battle than, y’know, planning, digging a trench, concentrating force, choosing the right weapon, etc. Torchbearer is open about how it takes over a dozen sessions to master the system, so while, yes, there is a paragraph about how the GM can give you a bonus if your plan is actually reasonably good, the system has low tactical transparency because gaming the system matters a lot more.

-Systems which abstract tactical thought itself into a character skill reduce tactical transparency: like if there's a “Read a Sitch””Discern Realities” or “Tactics” skill which gives you an abstract bonus when invoked and that bonus could matter as much or more than actually reading the situation described or actually discerning the realities from the clues given or actually thinking tactically then that interferes with tactical transparency. Like if using those skills gives me a +1 and me, as a person, taking the high ground gives me a +1, the relative value of my player skill vs the character skill in that system is reduced.

-Tactical transparency is not identical to “realism”, but overlaps with it: often a tired-ass forum n00b complaint that an abstraction in a game makes it less "realistic" is also a legitimate complaint that it makes the game less tactically transparent. See the "drunk, prone and on fire" example above.

-High-powered abilities within the fiction can work against tactical transparency, or at least against tactics: in the Fantasy Flight 40k RPGs there are some weapons, like storm bolters, which’ll just plain murdalize anyone in your way. So while you can sneak around trying to outflank and trip up the enemy, every round you spend cleverly setting up your attack is one less you spent spinning the Ballistic Skill Wheel to see if it lands on “The tyranid dies immediately”.  The only skill there is reading the book enough to know that this gun is really good--and reading about every other gun and piece of armor that doesn't have a clear name like "spiky club" or "shotgun". When a game is full of powerful abilities with in-world names the best tactic is basically just about bringing them to bear asap—even though they are technically elements of the setting not the system, they still involve you less in player skill because the most skilled player will realize the best option is always just “press the nuke button”. Identifying that takes skill, just not much.

-Obscure or misleading names for character abilities can work against tactical transparency: in DC Adventures you can have "Disarming Finesse" and you can have "Advance Disarm". If you're Captain Machiavelli trying to send the Delta League into the fortress and one of your team has the "finesse" one and the other has the "advanced" one, which one do you send to disarm Plasma Pig? It's impossible to tell without reading up on the system, so: not tactically transparent.

-Tactical transparency is not the same as transparency, clarity, or lack of misdirection in the fiction: If Sherlock Holmes can't find Moriarity because he's dressed as a bunny or can't hurt the Ghost Barghest of Belgium with his revolver even though the revolver should work, that has nothing to do with tactical transparency. If Sherlock can't find Moriarity because Sherlock was built with "Enhanced Perception" rather than "Perception Advance +3" or because the rules say Sherlock only can find Moriarity once he reaches Stage 5 then that is the system interfering with tactical transparency.

-Simple mechanics and tactically transparent mechanics can be completely different things. The rules of chess are simpler than those of almost any wargame. Yet the complex mesh of most wargames' rules generally end up reproducing simple military maxims: concentration of fire works, if there are rules for facing then flanking works, taking high ground works (you are above the enemy's cover so at a good angle), etc. Chess is an example of a game that is fairly simple mechanically but can be extremely tactically opaque. So a simple game system does not necessarily lead to simple choices for the player.

-5e's tactical transparency is arguable. At low levels, things that should matter in a fight do. At higher levels, feats and magic and alternate dice math make it less so, unless the GM is careful. You're picking spells: Is it better to have advantage on damage or 2 attacks? If you're trying to figure it out at all before a battle, that's not tactically transparent: that's doing system-specific math.

-A simple test: Is it worth bothering to get an opponent drunk, prone, and on fire before attempting to kill them? The more often true that is, the more tactically transparent the game you're playing probably is. There will be exceptions (no point in trying to get the robot drunk) but I'm going to make a big leap of faith and assume you get it.

This post is part of a series on RPG Theory:
Part 1--Intro to PIG-PIP
Part 2 
Part 3
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What's a Game Text Do? Why are we playing? What went wrong? PIG-PIP 2

Part two of a theory of RPGs.

Part one here.
Part three here.

Also:
Tactical Transparency

20. What Does A Game Text Do?

A game text is a nonliving and static participant in play.

("Static" barring releases of errata and, like, answers from the author in venues like Dragon mag back in the day or Twitter now. The text has some dynamism, it's still way slower than a player or GM.)

The text consists of a series of suggestions about goals to be pursued and procedures to be followed in the game session, usually along with an argument for pursuing those goals and following those procedures.

For example, if the art in a game shows someone in chainmail cutting up an owlbear that's both a suggestion (try to set up situations like this when you run your game) and an argument (it'll be fun if you set up this situation, following the rules here will help you set up this situation, etc).


21. About Fun

"Fun" is a shorthand expression. Really what we usually mean is "an experience the living participant finds desirable" which covers slightly more territory, including the possibility of cathartic experiences.

For example, everything we're talking about should apply to the person who left this comment on the last entry:
"

I think you'll need to say a lot about what you mean by fun. Depending on what you figure out you might need to justify it as the focus of your investigation. Because you need to accommodate some really diverse roleplaying experiences that we should deem successful, but don't seem to involve fun as we normally think about it.

For example: I normally play pretty standard dnd, but my favorite rpg experience was in a really constrained story game (A Walk in Winter Wood) and it was genuinely terrifying. There was no part of it that was pleasant---no jokes, moments of low tension, nothing. Just stress. I was terribly uncomfortable (but of course I was at least comfortable with the level of discomfort I was in. Or I was willing to undergo that much discomfort for the experience. Dunno how to phrase it.).

Anyway that experience was great because it touched on true horror and evoked real feeling. I don't know where fun enters in this analysis.

"

More narrowly, fun is sometimes used casually to refer to light-hearted kinds of desired experiences ("It's just a fun movie" etc) often connoting, in a game context, a relatively permissive game ("It was Pendragon but I broke the rules and played a horse because, hey, fun's fun"). Just noting that here because sometimes discussion gets confused because people are using different definitions.

22. Broad Goal of Play

To distribute the maximum experiences-found-desirable to the living players.

Jargon notes: If you just go "desirable experiences" then you have the silly problem where someone undergoes an experience someone else desires but doesn't like it. Like a vegetarian eating a cheeseburger is having an experience that is "able to be desired", so "desirable" (I like cheeseburgers) but not by them. That's the important part: the person gets a thing they liked.

Also note it's not necessarily desired experience past tense: the person doesn't have to get what they expected to get, only something that, once gotten, was liked.


23. Narrow Goal of Play

While it's all fine and good to say the goal of play is to distribute maximum fun (etc) experiences, practically speaking, planned leisure experiences always involve imagining a specific kind of desired experience ("let's go bowling it will be loud and convivial and there'll be melted cheese" "let's curl up on the couch and watch Antiques Roadshow it'll be cozy and chill")  and then, as it were, carving life down until it is sharp enough to penetrate the force field of boredom or the other foes of leisure from a very specific angle. One does not just throw unrelated fun-suggestions against the wall of Fort Boredom and hope one makes it through.

The game text argues not just for the desirability of experiences but for a specific kind of experience. This is where we can talk about the "desired experience": What you went in expecting and wanting.

For example: Procedures and advice for a horror game and for a comedy game have the same broad goal (22) and very different narrow goals.


24. Observation on Evaluating Game Texts

A lot of digital ink has gotten spilled over whether a game is "well-designed" or "poorly-designed" in arguments between people who are talking past each other because one is describing a failure to hit a purported Narrow Goal of Play (common phrases you'll hear: "but it failed because it was advertised as...", "but it failed because the author's intent was..." etc) and the other is describing a success in hitting the Broad Goal of Play.

A common iteration of this argument is about whether D&D or a version of it succeeds because people like it (often over all other experienced options) or a failure because the illustrations and ads suggest the Narrow Goal of Play is epic fantasy but actual play can be more like serial pulp or picaresque fantasy or just bathetic.


25. Observation on Game Communities

People (the game's living participants) are influenced by-, and in some cases arguably products of-, communities. Communities have norms, ranging from use of language ("dual-wield" is a gamerism, not a military-historical way of referring to two-handed weapon fighting) to procedural assumptions ("GM is always right"). As soon as a game involves more than one person, gaming can never exist outside of some kind of cultural assumptions (even if they are so limited as "What language do we use when we play?").

Cultural assumptions are thus very close to a "participant" (though technically: "a characteristic that participants have in common") and can and should be analyzed with the same scrutiny one analyzes the game text or individual player behavior when asking what went wrong or what went right in a game.


26. Practical Consideration for Game Texts About Community Assumptions

Since:

a) There are far fewer game communities than gamers
b) The author of a game text is far more likely to be familiar with the assumptions of game communities than individual gamers,
c) Assumptions in these communities vary widely, and
d) These assumptions can affect how the text's suggestions are interpreted

...it is desirable for a game text to, all other considerations being equal, communicate as much about how the suggestions inside interact with different communal assumptions as possible.


27. Limit on 26

There are few assumptions so bizarre that some gamer community on the internet somewhere does not hold them (including: you don't have to read the text to run the game and then decide it doesn't work), therefore there is a practical limit on the ability of any text to communicate every single aspect of how it interacts with communal assumptions.

A game text that spends time addressing each of the infinite ways communities could misconstrue it will eventually become so difficult to read (ie uncharismatic) that it works against its purpose of effectively providing suggestions for play.


28. Post-Game Analysis

A PIG-PIP analysis of a game session would consist of:

-Listing the participants (including players, texts, and other paraphernalia used)
-Describing specific contributions made by specific participants, with an eye specifically toward contributions that were atypical or different from contributions made in a game session that had a different outcome--like if trying to figure out why a session failed, look at how it was different than a similar one that succeeded and vice versa.
-Looking for "chemistry effects"--that is, interactions between participants whose result was complex or unusual. This is by far the most difficult part.

A good analysis might examine things like the interaction between GM and text (how many of the text's suggestions were thrown out or altered, which ones were used) player and text (which of the rules did the players engage especially, including spells, items, feats, etc) player and player (were they interpersonally helpful or disruptive to some players more than others) etc.

One tool would be a Punnet-squarish matrix like this: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/zaks-ez-adventure-making-chart_30.html

Part three is here.
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"The Game" (that is, "the words")--PIG-PIP

More RPG theory. Thoughts and suggestions welcome and needed.

Part 1--Intro to PIG-PIP
Part 2 
Part 3
Also:
Tactical Transparency

30. Game Text As Reference Vs Game Text As Speech

Tabletop RPG theory has usually, in the past, taken the form of practical advice directed usually and especially to one specific entity involved in games and negotiating its relationship to another entity: Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering is directed toward a GM and telling them how to work with players, the original Threefold Model, GNS, and RSP theory are directed toward matching groups to game texts or instructing writers on how to write game texts. The uniquely rhetorically complex nature of tabletop RPG game texts is often obscured.

The most obvious example is how often the game text is simply called "The Game". An example should illustrate the strangeness of this: you can't fully analyze how a team played baseball without reference to the home-field advantage, even though the home-field advantage is nowhere in the rulebook, yet over and over in formal RPG theory The Game and all its outcomes are supposed to proceed from the rules.

Game books work in many ways. Right now I'm going to draw a distinction between non-fiction texts as reference and non-fiction texts as speech.

"Reference" here means in the sense of a dictionary: a set of statements, recommendations, etc consulted in pieces, where the meaning doesn't depend on reading in a linear way. That is: a dictionary still makes sense if you read  the entry for"Pepper" before "Aardvark".

"Speech" here is used in the sense of "The president gave a speech": that is, a series of rhetorical moves where the order changes or is intended to chance if not the meaning precisely then at least the reception of the words by the audience. A speech is different if it begins "My fellow Americans..." vs "A funny thing happened on the way to the VFW tonight..." even if both statements are somewhere in both versions of the speech.

Most RPG theory treats the game text ("The Game") as if it only acts as reference: The rules are there and allegedly responsible for discrepancies between desire and outcome.

In reality, even before the "What's This Game About?" section, there is an image. This image takes different forms:

If the game is not famous (as with most games that you might hear about online or with Dungeons & Dragons as it appeared to wargamers in 1974) the image is a combination of what is on the cover and what the words on that cover communicate ("Dungeons & Dragons, Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper And Pencil and Miniature Figures" "Men & Magic" and a picture of a warrior in unrealistically--fantastically, you might say--spiky armor).

If the game is famous, the first image is a combination of the reputation of the game, the advertising of the game, and the actual packaging.

This is not a small thing. Because both players and GM:

-Choose to begin participating largely if they are attracted to the image
-Are often given the book or offered the opportunity to play based on someone else's assessment that they are attracted to the image--in some cases by parents who will forever know nothing more than the image, and
-(Most importantly) since tabletop RPGs require that participants invent elements to even work at all, and participants consciously and unconsciously assume that fun happens by bending their choices toward the image and the tropes it implies (name the elf "Silverblade", include a castle with a moat even if moats aren't in the rules yet)

...the initial and subsequent images the text presents shape genuine play in tabletop RPGs in real and extensive ways that are difficult to fully describe without going beyond just a programmer or boardgame designer's vocabulary of rules, but also the vocabularies of art, psychology and sociology.

Some examples:

The very first RPG book includes a fan-submitted illustration of creatures described nowhere in the text: "Beautiful Witch" and "Amazon". Knowing this was a "fantastic medieval" game was enough for at least this player to realize these characters could be in it.

Vampire: The Masquerade has a complex and ongoing LARP culture that uses rules nowhere in the original text. However, the themes emphasized in the LARPs (powers, humanity loss, feeding, etc) are all strongly influenced by the text-as-speech if not loyal to the text-as-reference.

It's usually understood that inventions "inside" a game's presumed genre tropes "should" work and those outside it void the warranty ("firearms will ruin your D&D game") but what does and does not fit the tropes is often assumed to be clearer to each living participant than it is. Genre assumptions are usually treated as something that either need not be said, or something that can very easily be said, when in reality getting a full palette of genre assumptions across is as complex and fraught an act of communication as trying to teach someone what musical gestures represent "jazz" and which don't.

For example, this isn't a flaw in Apocalypse World. That's not because it is mechanically impossible or undesirable in the rules-as-reference, but because the rhetorical structure of Apocalypse World as rules-as-speech would scare off anyone who thought this would be fun.

Because tropes and assumptions shape play as much or sometimes more than rules, when considering the influence of a text-as-speech in forming a game experience, a critic needs to consider a number of cultural and sociological factors including:

-When it was written
-What genre tropes can readers be assumed to be aware of (is steampunk a thing yet for this audience?)
-What the illustrations suggest
-What the wider awareness of the game or games was in the mind of the reader (many small online RPGs assume a reader knows what an RPG is, or assume familiarity with at least D&D)
-What gameplay culture does the text assume is dominant
-Whether audiences interacting with the text can be assumed to be homogenous (all equally aware of steampunk tropes) or heterogeneous (some need it explained more than others)
-How much of the text will be read by different participants and which part (it's common that nobody playing a given D&D game has read all the spell descriptions, or that only one person who's playing Dread has even touched the book)
-How charismatic is the text about presenting different principles and procedures vs others and for which audiences (It's possible one potential player could walk away from Dogs in the Vineyard excited about moral choices while another walks away hoping for shoot-outs with demon children whose hair moves in the wind even when there isn't any--this will shape play).

I would add a caveat saying that the more freedom of choice an RPG offers, the more "soft" rhetorical gestures can influence play, but in practice I've found every RPG offers so much freedom that these gestures always matter. You can "break" pretty much any game by deciding to play against the style it assumes but the textual acrobatics required to procedurally hard-code rules that head-off such fuckery are always a burden in themselves (though that subject should be addressed formally in a later entry).
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Staggered, Dazed and Hindered (or, What Was Mainstream Game Design?)

If I were asked to sum up the term "mainstream RPG design" up in three sentences I’d say:

Blind: A combined condition. The character cannot see, so everything effectively has full visual concealment from him. He is hindered, visually unaware, and vulnerable, and may be impaired or disabled for activities where vision is a factor.

A lot of people (or at least a lot of people like you, who read blogs about role-playing games in their spare time) talk about "mainstream game design" in terms of being something they don't want to do. But what is it? Why do people make it? What can we learn from it and attempts to avoid it?

It's not exactly Dungeons and Dragons. Editions of D&D take an unusually long time to produce and are pretty fraught due to fan and corporate interest, so every edition of D&D--technically the world's most mainstream RPG-- inevitably includes:

-a mishmash of relics left over from how things used to be (a thing called "saving throws" which are just a kind of stat check in every other game)

-trailing indicators of current trends (inspiration, traits), and

-innovations (advantage/disadvantage)

...so it's rarely a good example. While most RPG design trots from trend to trend, D&D--like the other still-surviving big properties from the 80s and 90s--gets slingshotted forward in time every five or ten years and bounces around drunkenly trying to find a level until it starts all over again.

I would say the current Monster Manual and spell list in 5e are pretty much mainstream design incarnate, but if you really want to know what would happen if you gave a monkey a Mac and 5 cents an hour and said "Write the most mainstream game possible" for any given year, D&D as a whole is too much of a patchwork to use as a model.

Instead, I'd propose that the best way to find an example of the zero-experiment flattened-bobcat dead-center of the middle-of-the-road at any given time is to ask Green Ronin.

And the hallmark of Green Ronin design is: breathtaking thoughtlessness. 

The Green Ronin name is not especially attached to any specific property (unlike White Wolf and World of Darkness) or system (unlike Pinnacle and Savage Worlds)  or designer (unlike Pelgrane and Robin Laws) or even design philosophy (unlike most smaller indie presses) and they have a record of license-chasing, including Dragon Age, Song of Ice & Fire, D&D/D20 and DC Comics.

Green Ronin is to RPGs what Dark Horse would be to comics if you subtracted out Sin City, Hellboy, Concrete and anything else anyone made by someone who was paid well and wanted to be there.  They'll make you whatever you want, poorly, and throw in a copy of Predator vs Buck Rogers, free.

If the Ronin is Green, it's only because that's the natural state of a chameleon. 

So GR is going to provide us our example:

DC Adventures

Why DC Adventures? Though it is almost a decade old there are two reasons for this--one good, one bad. 

The bad reason is: the DC Adventures game is the only Green Ronin book I can get through without falling asleep.  I'll need a picture from a different, more recent, GR game to show you what I mean:

They not only put this picture in a book, they put it on the page meant to advertise it. Thanks to the art that came along with the license, DC Adventures at least doesn't look like someone plugged a mannequin directly into a Cintiq and hit "print".

The good reason is: it is probably their most popular game. If you add in the parent system--Mutants & Masterminds, it definitely is. It had a whole line, with a whole line developer. 

People wanted this game--and it can still be found on the shelves of local game stores next to D&D, Pathfinder, Star Wars and maybe some 40K games.

A lot of folks may read this and go "Well that's just 3.5./the D20 era." or even "Well this is just a crunchy game". Well, no, because:

-All those D20 designers are still around and making things

-Deciding to adapt someone else's system is a choice

-The total self-sabotage, in terms of "helping fun be had" is on the shoulders of the person doing the adapting is real.

-These same kinds of bad decisions where you don't think what the player gets out of the system are being made now with people adapting 5e, people adapting Fate, people adapting PBTA, people who were at Fantasy Flight doing 40k, etc. etc.

Has "normal" moved on since this game was put out? Yes. But what's important isn't the trends in game design they're aping, it's the utter thoughtlessness with which they do it.

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So that's the context, as for what's inside, it does what it intends to do, and what it intends to do is unambitious and will be soon superceded. Its limitations are real and frustrating, but chosen. Let's see what that means...

-The cover is Alex Ross--as mainstream as it could be. On the credits page we find the actual designer Steve Kenson (who did its parent, Mutants and Masterminds and now the equally unappealing Icons and is still around). Nicole Lindroos and Chris Pramas, the company's heads (of whom the less said the better, at least for them), as well as a huge list of DC Comics artists--though artist names are not attached or indexed to the specific pictures they did, which, given the fat block of names, kind of guts the point of crediting them--even I can't figure half of them out and I can tell when George Perez inked himself at 400 feet. Which you might call thoughtless. Maybe I missed something and real credits are elsewhere idk.

Quotes from the book are in italics:

Halfway between skills and powers, advantages are minor abilities characters have, allowing them to do things others cannot. They range from special combat maneuvers to things like financial resources, contacts, and so forth. Many advantages have no rank, or rather just one rank; a character either has the advantage (and the benefits that it grants) or does not. Other advantages may have multiple ranks, like abilities and skills, measuring their effectiveness.

Why do we have skills and advantages? If you must have ranked and unranked things, why not divide them by that instead and name the two different things that way?

Oh but these are quibbles in comparison to the concept of ranks themselves:

Each rank represents a range of measures. Time rank 4 is actually all measures between 1 and 2 minutes, and time rank 16 is everything between 2 and 4 days! So if you’re looking for a measurement that’s not on the table, pick the next highest one that is; so 12 hours is a time rank of 13 (more than 8 hours, but less than 16), and 6 miles is a distance rank of 11 (more than 4 miles, but less than 8).

This idea of ranking different measures of things (time, space, weight) using universal ranks was in the orginal DC Heroes RPG in the '80s. Possibly earlier. 

In D&D magic a spell might last Level Minutes or Level Hours—say 3 hours or minutes at Level 3. In games like this a power lasts Level Time (and then you look up how many minutes or hours 3 is in Time).

I have yet to discover a single advantage to this system either in terms of playing or writing the game—you still have to look something up, you’re just looking up the measurments table instead of the power description. In addition, though it looks like precision, the math requires vagueness “Time rank 4 is actually all measures between 1 and 2 minutes” well that’s everything from 10 to 20 combat rounds, Ronin, kinda not terrible helpful considering the amount of work it takes to design a system of measurement and keep it consistent across all powers.

The time it takes a Speed 14 hero to cover 30 miles is rank –1, or 3 seconds.

Fuck off.

Don’t directly add ranks. Putting rank 4 distance together with rank 6 distance is not rank 10 distance! Rank 4 is a distance measurement of 500 feet. Rank 6 is 600 yards (1,800 feet). Adding the measurements, you get about 2,300 feet. If you directly added the ranks, you’d get rank 10 distance, or 4 miles! If you have different ranks, it is best to either handle them separately or convert them to measurements, add the measurements together, and convert them back to a rank. In the previous example, 2,300 feet is rank 7 distance (around half a mile).

Fuck off again.

Measurements are approximate. Especially at the higher end, where each rank represents a wide range of measurements, the Measurements Table isn’t intended to provide precise values; it’s just a ballpark estimate so you have an idea of how things work in the context of the game. Don’t focus too heavily on precise answers, just use the table for general guidelines.

Then why are we using this system? Can we just have hours and minutes back?

Interestingly enough, the actual numbers in the Measurement System are similar in important ways to the original Mayfair DC Heroes game which used a totally different resolution engine. In Marvel, the strongest heroes lift around 100 tons  according to the game and the Official Handbook (if you’re wondering: no, this isn’t at all consistent with the comic depictions, the Hulk picks up ocean liners no problem he's not even mad). In DC Heroes and Adventures that’s a mere 12 strength, which is where Wonder Woman was in the 2nd ed DC Heroes. 21 here is 50k tons, and iirc in DC Heroes it was 50k tons in the older game. The heroes themselves however are very different: Wonder Woman is now 16 strength and Superman and Captain Marvel now 19. This means: systemwonk canon is more stable than comic book canon, and, at least if you ask DC, Wonder Woman is benchpressing 16 times what Thor is.

To determine the distance a hero covers in a given amount of time, add the rank of the time to the rank of the hero’s speed, with normal human ground speed being rank 0. So a normal person can cover 2 miles in an hour (time 9 + speed 0 = 9, the rank for 2 miles). In fact, with normal human speeds, you can just directly compare the time and distance columns of the table! As another example, a hero with Flight 12 can cover 8,000 miles in an hour! That’s 12 (speed) + 9 (time) = 21, the rank for 8,000 miles. The same character can go an amazing 16 miles in just 6 seconds (the time of one action round)!

This is a lot of work to avoid just writing a power that says “You can fly Level x 20 mph or Level x 20 feet per round”.

You’d think this would at least make power descriptions shorter? No.

You move through soil and sand at a speed rank equal to your Burrowing rank, minus 5. So Burrowing 8, for example, lets you move through the ground at speed rank 3 (around 16 MPH). 

Why isn’t your speed at least just equal to your Burrowing rank? Because of the math burden created by the measurement system.

The DC Heroes universal measurement system is also strange from the POV of transparency and accessibility. You’d think if the game is meant to be accessible to people familiar with D&D or DC comics or just numbers, you’d make however strong Superman was supposed to be at 20 or 25 or 30 (in the original Dc Heroes it was 50) or another round number to “cap” the system, then scale down from there for everyone else—thus giving a new player a good idea of how powerful an ability was “half as strong as Superman” or even “as fast as Superman is strong” etc. But nope: 19. And Mr Battlesuit (a generic Iron Man style character you can use as a base) has a Stamina of 1? Is that a bad score? Ok my dudes.

Here’s a great vulnerability of these kinds of rules: false efficiency.

I look up a power or object or rule (say pg 57?). It says the effect leaves someone “Hindered”. I then have to turn to page 18 and look up Hindered:

What’s hindered?

“Hindered: A hindered character moves at half normal speed (–1 speed rank). Immobile supersedes hindered.”

(And hindered isn’t Impaired or Fatigued or Exhausted— whole other things—so the chance of me memorizing it straight off isn’t great)

It’d be a lot simpler if it just said what hindered meant under the description of the power//object/rule. It’s simpler for the designer’s life to just go “Hindered is a condition, it’s the same every time, I’ll stick this word here instead of this sentence” it’s harder for the player or GM referencing it—if it’s a deluxe pdf  and the word “hindered” is hotlinked, it’s still a click away and you may not easily be able to click back to where you were.

It looks, if you're an engineer, like efficiency but if you actually think about play at the table it’s not.

Even worse, the next page has combined conditions—conditions that reference 1 or more other conditions .

Some are just stupid and unnecessary:

Restrained: A restrained character is hindered and vulnerable. If the restraints are anchored to an immobile object, the character is immobile rather than hindered. If restrained by another character, the restrained character is immobile but may be moved by the restraining character.

Incapacitated: An incapacitated character is defenseless, stunned, and unaware. Incapacitated characters generally also fall prone, unless some outside force or aid keeps them standing.

Staggered: A staggered character is dazed and hindered.

So if you have a bad guy with a power that staggers people, you gotta look that up, then look back at the other section to find Hindered (pg 18), then turn the page to look up Dazed (pg 17). 

…insted of just writing “This leaves the target with 1 action per round and at half normal speed.”

Like that's it. That is the description. Really could you not just have done that?

This isn't a fault of the D20 system, this is what failure to think about what you're doing and who you're doing it for looks like.

Also: the conditions could’ve at least fit on one spread of the book but they stuck a couple pictures in there and so fucked that right up.

This fiddly language even get into the description of what different level superhumans are like. From Power 10 Superhumans:

Power level 10 heroes may have a balance of attack and effect, defense and resistance, or may go for being stronger on one side than the other, having great combat skill, but comparatively limited damage, for example, or great Toughness, but lowered defenses.

Not like "Teen Titans are Power Level 10" but: that.

Spending Hero Points in this game is hilarious trash. (From the point of view of someone who likes games to be a challenge from the character’s pov. If you’re a dull person I'm sure its all as exciting as the new Decembrists album.) Some things you can do:

You can “edit” a scene to grant your hero an advantage by adding or changing certain details. For example, a hero is fighting a villain with plant-based powers in a scientific lab. You deduce the villain may be weakened by defoliants, so you ask the GM if there are any chemicals in the lab you can throw together to create a defoliant. The Gamemaster requires a hero point to add that detail and says the right chemicals are close at hand. Now you just have to use them!

 This option is intended to give players more input into the story and allow their heroes chances to succeed, but it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for planning and cleverness, just as a way to enhance them.

So the chance of having a chemical in a lab isn’t random, it’s the effect of having done hero stuff. Let's say you didn't have a hero point: is there suddenly no chance of having a defoliant in a lab? Is the cleverness of thinking there might be suddenly negated by not having previously done a hero thing and gotten the points?

It's philosophically complicated but I don't think it's pushing it to say:

A straightforward way to reward cleverness is to say if you think of the idea "maybe the lab has defoliants" then maybe you can look for them and if you (cleverly) play to the character's strengths and they happen to be in chemistry or noticing stuff than maybe this looking is more likely to be successful. 

Throwing in a currency that is given for previous play encourages something else but it isn't in-game cleverness.

Ok, you're not convinced? This is much worse:

You can spend a hero point to gain the benefits of one rank of an advantage you don’t already have until the end of your next turn (see the Advantages chapter). 

So essentially there’s a whole arsenal of effects under Advantages….

Accurate Attack Trade effect DC for attack bonus.

All-out Attack Trade active defense for attack bonus.

Chokehold Suffocate an opponent you have successfully grabbed.

Close Attack +1 bonus to close attack checks per rank.

Defensive Attack Trade attack bonus for active defense bonus.

…

Throwing Mastery +1 damage bonus with thrown weapons per rank.

Uncanny Dodge Not vulnerable when surprised or caught off-guard.

Weapon Bind Free disarm attempt when you actively defend.

Weapon Break Free smash attack when you actively defend.

You suddenly get to-/have to- sort through mid fight. 

This rewards system mastery and staring at page 70 mid-game instead of being engaged with the fictional positioning. That is: what your character in the comic-book panel in your head is actually up to.

None of this has anything to do with how The Flash beats the Weather Wizard. This is just pure systemwonkery. It’s opposed to tactical transparency. You gotta actually know the system to gain the benefit which is a bad thing at most tables including any one I've enjoyed.

You can spend a hero point to get sudden inspiration in the form of a hint, clue, or bit of help from the GM.

Yes this is like the Idea roll in Call of Cthulhu. it’s stupid there too. Learn to say "I look at the ceiling", Batman.

You can also use hero points to remove the cost of “Extra Effort” rolls, which opens up a variety of other options that look a lot like the Advantages (enhancing speed, enhancing strength, etc). So: more system mastery. Less tactical transparency. You get stronger by having done something unrelated last scene and having read the book alone a lot.

What's a better hero point system look like?

In Marvel Superheroes/FASERIP hero points just help you with a roll. Period. It might not even work and you have to announce you're spending them before you roll--so it can't be reliably used to circumvent a problem that could be solved by thinking.

It’s simple, and though it somewhat mitigates pure tactical challenge it doesn’t make you think outside the character’s pov much, unlike say spending a point to claim some acid was already there or going ok I want to use my points to temporarily be better at throwing specifically. It encourages a kind of thinking I like.

In FASERIP you go "Do you want to spend karma on the roll?". That's it--it's a moment of gambling that makes the stakes feel higher. It works, too, it really does feel like that panel in a Marvel comic where someone goes "Must...move...thing...before...I...drown...".

I can save people, act in character, fight a bad guy (all things I’d be doing anyway) and then the math slides in my direction according to how much effort I put in. In DCA game there’s an element of having to switch to being the author rather than being like “I am trying hard” (represented by 70 karma pts) there’s “I need a new idea”--ok, spend  a hero point.

Karma in FASERIP makes conditions more favorable—-it’s very comparable to effort and motivation. Hero points in DCA move you into the writer’s position--or the minmaxer's--forcing you to squeeze the rules to get an efficient result. 

--

Character gen is point-buy.

There are a number of archetypes prebuilt and you can customize them (like "Battlesuit guy")—which is a bone to how fucking pointlessly complex the system is. They build half the person for you then let you fiddle with whatever parts you dare to understand.

Other than the archetypes, character gen doesn’t do much to inspire new ideas unless you want a megapowerful character and so end up having to buy disadvantages that make you more interesting. But such is point-buy.

--

More crunch: if you wanna play Master of Kung Fu you need hella system mastery.

The Gadgeteer and Martial Artist rely a great deal on their advantages (as do other archetypes like the Crime Fighter and Weapon-Master). You’ll want to read the descriptions of all of the character’s advantages from the Advantages chapter so you know the benefits they provide. Remember to make use of them during play to give your character every appropriate, well, advantage.

In particular, note how some advantages and even powers work together. The Gadgeteer can use Quick-Thinking to speed up the process of inventing (see Inventing, page 145) and Skill Mastery (Technology) to make some inventing checks as routine. Similarly, note the Martial Artist’s Power Attack advantage, good for doing extra damage to slow, tough, opponents, and the Skill Mastery (Acrobatics) advantage for pulling off formidable (DC 25) Acrobatics checks as routine!

I don’t get the point of any system where just having a really good "Acrobatics" isn’t all you need to be good at acrobatics.

At least in Pathfinder, you can justify it by going "Ok monks and rogues might make more of their high dex than another class" but in a superhero game there's no excuse

there's no classes. Spiderman is good because he has a high score. Its simple. It works. There isn't a problem, in any take on the superhero genre, with letting Spiderman do all kinds of acrobatics.

Enhanced Strength 10, plus Enhanced Strength 2, Limited to Lifting (Lifting Str 14; 400 tons) • 22 points.

I mean why?

You can have abilities that increase your dodge, but…acrobatics isn’t one of them?

Feinting in combat is part of Deception and makes the target get the “vulnerable” condition til next round.

Here's a complete player skill override:

You can use Deception to send covert messages using wordplay and double-meanings while apparently talking about other things. The DC for a basic message is 10. Complex messages or messages trying to communicate new information have DCs of 15 or 20, respectively. The recipi- ent of the message must make an Insight check against the same DC to understand it.

Noncombat skills are very lightly supported—both “Streetwise” and “Magic” —undeniably useful knowledge-bases in the DC Universe—are given as examples that might be chosen under the grab-bag skill “Expertise” alongside “Carpentry” and “Cooking”.

So helping to solve the crime (half the story in lots of superhero comics and games) using Streetwise or Magic is weighted the same as being good at kitchens and bathrooms.

This interferes with defining the character, personalitywise—in a game where even Deception can give you a bonus in basically any fight and a list of combat-useful Advantages literally as long as a child’s arm that you all buy from the same pool, choosing to have a character that can cook is choosing to make your PC less effective in most situations.

How come Green Arrow got killed and had to come back from the land of the dead in a Kevin Smith comic and Batman didn’t? Well because Green Arrow spent vital character creation points learning to make chili:

This is a problem that can only be solved three ways, as far as I know:

-Establish the campaign world up front such that the challenges are such that only well-rounded or characters will survive (this can be very boring—because it means you have to make the campaign more predictable and know or convince your players you know what the game will be like before it starts) and will include making chili.

-Set aside a given number of points or a section of character gen for only noncombat skills (DC Adventures feints toward this with “Complications” but doesn’ follow through).

-Randomness.

There are people who will make “thematic builds” instead of “combat builds” but putting these players side by side in a superhero game risks making combat less interesting. You got people who are straight up so nightmarishly good that letting anyone else try is pointless—this is already a problem on the scale superhero games operate, exacerbating it by letting the details get out of control is not really feeding into any group’s needs or wants.

A good game doesn’t force the Superman player into a position where them having their fun risks fucking up everyone else’s. Players and campaigns (like ongoing comics) need to be able to have moods—sometimes they do this, sometimes they do that. If the ony way to do That is to choose to be decisively, worldbendingly worse at This, then you’ve made the campaign less flexible.

Having a PC that is stupid but strong (and, character-gen wise, stupid because they are strong) is one thing—that can even be funny and interesting in the game. Having a character have to choose between being strong and, say, having a hobby driving drag racers is just making the character less interesting in a way that doesn’t benefit the game at all.

If you're going to have "personality trait"-like skills in the system, encourage players to take them without an effectiveness penalty.

--

You can use Intimidation in combat as a standard action to undermine an opponent’s confidence. Make an Intimidation check as a standard action. If it succeeds, your target is impaired (a –2 circumstance penalty on checks) until the end of your next round. With four or more degrees of success, the target is disabled (a –5 penalty) until the end of your next round.

Oh do you take Intimidation or Deception? Intimidation lets me use a standard check to make an opponent Impaired, Deception let’s me use a standard check to make an opponent Vulnerable! Which is worse? Oh I’d better Master This System.

Here's an advantage you can have on top of having a good archery score, to be good at aiming:

When you take a standard action to aim, you gain an improved circumstance bonus: +10 for a close attack or ranged attack adjacent to the target, +5 for a ranged attack at a greater distance. See Aim, page 175, for details.

Green Arrow has this advantage.

Is this even a thing?

Like: Green Arrow is better at shooting with bows than anyone else. Fine, That already means his aiming means more than anyone else aiming (his shooting-people-with-bows number gets bigger). Does it have to get bigger again? 

Fast Grab, Improved Grab and Improved Hold are three different things. So if you want to make Lobsterman that’s that much more work.

“Inspire” and “leadership” are different things.

When taking a standard action and a move action you can move both before and after your standard action, provided the total distance moved isn’t greater than your normal movement speed.

This is a common advantage for fast-moving heroes, like the Flash.

Why not just include that as part of the superspeed power? It's actually a nice way to model that without adding a bunch of math.

Building powers--the supposed benefit of this system--is bananas:

 For example, a weather-controlling heroine has the following effects: Damage, Concealment, and Environment. Her Damage effect is the power to throw lightning bolts, so it has the descriptor “lightning.” If a villain can absorb electricity, then his power works against the heroine’s Damage (since lightning is electrical in nature). Concealment creates thick banks of fog, giving it the “fog” or “mist” descriptor. So if an opponent transforms into mist, with the ability to regenerate in clouds or fog, he can regenerate inside the heroine’s Concealment area. Her Environment is the power to control the weather, giving it the descriptor “weather.”

So in order to have Weather Control you need to read through all the powers til you find out “Environment” does whatever that was?

Practically speaking there’s only 2 ways to create a new superhero in this system:

-Read through the system yourself and totally master it

-Ask someone who’s done that already to make your character for you

There’s no good reason for this. Some people like the challenge of extracting a character from an opaque system: this game only works if everyone at the table is them or is willing to hand the translation of their creativity over to them or if everyone is ok with having a system full of bs nobody uses.

This is another example of False Efficiency: yes, controlling the weather in comics usually means you can zap people with lightning, which is basically just like zapping them with eyebeams, but even though bundling them as the same “effect” and calling Weather Control a combined power including both effects sounds efficient if you’re a programmer, if you’re actually playing it means you have to look up twice as much stuff and include more stuff when trying to write the power. So, again, it’s not actually efficient to any of the users

Look how hard it is to “build” telepathy out of its constituent parts:

Rapid: Your communication occurs 10 times faster than normal speech. Each additional rank increases communication speed by a factor of 10. This is useful for high-speed computer links, “deep sharing” psychic rapports, and so forth. Flat +1 point

Selective: If you have the Area extra, you can choose which receiver(s) within range get your Communication, excluding everyone else. This allows you to go from a single receiver (point-to-point) to all potential receivers in range (omni-directional) or anywhere in between. +1 cost per rank

Subtle: Your Communication cannot be “overheard” (it is encrypted, scrambled, or otherwise protected). With 2 ranks, your Communication cannot even be detected. That is, no one can even tell you are transmitting, much less what you’re saying. Flat +1 or 2 points

Like you can’t just say “you can send messages with your mind to whoever you want, buy a range”. This is just stupidity really, at this point, it’s not even an oversight.

Healing does not work on subjects unable to recover on their own, such as creatures with no Stamina rank or inanimate objects.

Fuck off.

Like Trail of Cthulhu, DCA recommends railroading. But the complications system actually intentionally enables it:

Some staples of the DC comic books, while enjoyable in the stories themselves, don’t always translate well to the medium of roleplaying games. You might want to take these “translation issues” into account when planning your adventures.

DEFEAT AND CAPTURE

Heroes in the comics are frequently defeated early on in a story. The typical structure is: the heroes encounter the villain, suffer a defeat or reversal, and then come back from defeat to overcome the villain. 

In longer stories there may be several reversals: the villain beats the heroes and escapes, then beats the heroes and puts them in a deathtrap, which they must escape to make their final confrontation with the bad guy.

DC adventures encourages this kind of narrative structure by awarding hero points for defeats, capture, and similar complications suffered by the heroes. Essentially, the more the heroes struggle early on in the game, the more resources (in this case, hero points) they have to overcome the villain later.

Defeat in the comics isn’t a serious problem, since it usually just results in the heroes facing another obstacle, like a deathtrap, rather than ending the story. Some players, however, don’t care for the idea of defeat, even when there is some kind of reward for it. This may come from other RPGs, where defeat has much more serious consequences, up to and including the death of the heroes! It can also come from associating any kind of defeat or set-back with “losing the game.” These players may overreact to potential defeats in the game.

The best way of handling this is to discuss it with your players. Point out that an early defeat by the villain is not necessarily a “loss,” but a complication, and that they earn hero points for complications, leading up to the point where they can use their earned points against the villain. If this doesn’t address the issue, you may need to give the heroes complications other than defeats, at least at first. When you do have the heroes defeated as a complication, make sure the players all know that there is no chance for their heroes to avoid this once you spring it on them, to minimize the opportunity for them to struggle and rail hopelessly against it.

In other words: if the PC gets captured its part of a plot and plots are planned.

Initial encounters also provide opportunities for the heroes to earn hero points. This means the early encounters in the adventure don’t have to go well for the heroes. In fact, it’s better for them in the long run if they don’t go well. The more complications the heroes face early on, the more hero points they earn for use later in the adventure. In the classic comics story, the heroes encounter the threat and suffer a defeat of some sort: the villain may get away, the heroes’ powers may prove inadequate to deal with the problem, their plan may not work, and so forth. The heroes then regroup, come up with a new plan, and try again.

...A good guideline for awarding hero points is at least one hero point per scene in the adventure leading up to the final scene.

A seldom appreciated knock-on effect here:

The abstract GM advice is: railroad them.

The incentive system is: use your hero points in that final encounter—which means knowing how to use them (it isn’t as simple as FASERIP where they just add to the die roll). At least in practice this means that the game is kinda designed to force you to numberwang around in order to “win”.

And, just in case you forgot:

This is a “Bystander”

STR 0, STA 0, AGL 0, DEX 0, FGT 0, INT 0, AWE 0, PRE 0 Equipment: cell phone. Advantages: Equipment 1. Skills: Expertise: Choose One 4 (+4), Expertise: Current Events 2 (+2), Expertise: Pop Culture 2 (+2). Offense: Init +0, Unarmed +0 (Damage 0). Defense: Dodge 0, Parry 0, Fort 0, Tou 0, Will 0. Totals: Abilities 0 + Powers 0 + Advantages 1 + Skills 4 + Defenses 0 = 5

Here’s a cop:

STR 2, STA 2, AGL 1, DEX 1, FGT 3, INT 0, AWE 1, PRE 1 Equipment: Bulletproof vest (+4 Toughness vs. Ballistic), light pistol, tonfa, cell phone, handcuffs. Advantages: Equipment 3. Skills: Athletics 3 (+5), Expertise: Current Events 2 (+2), Expertise: Streetwise 3 (+3), Expertise: Police Officer 4 (+4), Insight 4 (+5), Intimidation 2 (+3), Investigation 2 (+2), Perception 4 (+5), Ranged Combat: Pistols 4 (+5), Treatment 2 (+2), Vehicles 4 (+5). Offense: Init +1, Unarmed +3 (Damage 2), Tonfa +3 (Damage 3), Pistol +5 (Ranged Damage 3). Defense: Dodge 2, Parry 4, Fort 4, Tou 6/2, Will 2. Totals: Abilities 22 + Powers 0 + Advantages 3 + Skills 17 + Defenses 5 = 47

Jesus fuck. It literally occurred to no human being involved that a GM might want to pick up this book in the middle of a game and see whether the cop was good at shooting and that there might be a reason to not make that d10 seconds at the table excruciating.

So, yeah, traditionally I'd say "Do better!" at this point, but we know the incentives are all to make sure that doesn't happen. So, I don't know, end capitalism and make therapy reliable and free and then wait another decade?

And how many lectures on "creepy male gazey dude game art" were Green Ronin
staffers giving while making a point of showing us this?