I was thinking about writing a full and proper review of the Star Trek: New Frontier novels by Peter David. It was not necessarily going to be a review full of sunshine and happy thoughts (the prose and plotting are both sloppy; the characters are frequently off-model; the exposition is clumsy and redundant; the continuity is inconsistent and contradictory), but I was certainly enjoying them as pulp fiction.

But having just finished the fifth book (Martyr) I’m afraid I’ve hit the straw that broke my back:

Robin Lefler’s mother was kidnapped by an alien race called the Momidiums? Her MOM was kidnapped by the MOM-idiums?

No. Sorry. After a book filled with clumsy puns, you have officially crossed the line from “eye-rolling” to “Cheap Xanth Knock-Off”. And I want no part of it.

If you look at the history of mechanical design for roleplaying games, I think there’s a very clear arc:

(1) You start with games that have very specific game structure that has been placed into a wider “world simulation”. (The influence from wargames is clear here.)

(2) The level of detail in the world simulation begins to grow, but is still largely contained to clear game structures. (Basically, the desire to simulate reality found within the existing wargames community began to expand as the focus of the games expanded beyond the battlefield.)

(3) Generic games appear. In seeking to provide universal rules, however, these games actually end up stripping out the vestigial game structures that still existed in RPGs. (Reading contemporary documents, it seems pretty clear that people at the time weren’t really conscious of the game structures in RPGs. In fact, most gamers still aren’t.)

(4) Between the universal focus and the removal of game structures, the desire for simulation metastasizes. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, every game that came out tried to graft on more and more detail, accuracy, and specificity. (For example, look at the first edition of Paranoia: Hilarious, evocative game universe. But the rule system is completely obsessed with detailed simulation.)

(5) Around the mid-’80s, however, you start to see the backlash. A growing body of games are being designed with deliberately simpler rules because other games have gotten too complex (this is even talked about in the rulebooks themselves). (I generally point to West End Games as an early instigator for this with Ghostbusters and Star Wars, but that may just be a perspective bias on my part.)

(6) The first wave of these “rules lighter” games generally just scaled back the rules while maintaining the same focus on world simulation, but by the early ’90s you start seeing some designers really embrace the rules-light movement by looking at radically alternative approaches. (Amber Diceless Roleplaying and other diceless games are a really noticeable part of this.)

The fallout from this, IMO and IME, was that the entire spectrum of RPG system design was basically open for business: We’d explored rules heavy, bounced back to rules light (now featuring unified mechanics), and now people were basically experimenting all over the place.

If there was a major trendline in the ’90s it was the boom of splatbook-universes (Torg, World of Darkness, Legend of the 5 Rings, Deadlands, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Fading Suns, AD&D’s campaign worlds, and a ton of wannabes). As you hit the late ’90s, these product lines all burn out their supplement treadmills. Shortly thereafter you get the D20 boom and the STG revolution.

A quick walk through the history of the saving throw mechanic:

(1) OD&D offered an incomplete, source/type-based array of saving throws. This created a couple of problems, one of which was that many effects would actually fall into multiple categories. Did the DM simply make a ruling for which applied? Did a character always use the best-applicable saving throw? Or should they always use the worst-applicable saving throw?

(2) AD&D eliminated that problem by establishing a fairly clear hierarchy of which saving throw category should be applied first. But it didn’t fix the other problem, which is that many effects which required saving throws didn’t conveniently fall into any particular category. There were two possible solutions: Create a new category every time you needed one or simply arbitrarily assign one of the existing saving throw categories. In general, designers and DMs did the latter. This assignation was often based on a rough approximation of “method of avoidance” (you avoid dragon breath by ducking out of the the way, this effect could be avoided by ducking out of the way, so let’s make it a save vs. dragon breath) or “similarity of effect” (dragon breath is a big blast of fire, this trap is creating a big blast of fire, so let’s make it a save vs. dragon breath). (These methods often overlapped.)

(3) D&D3 eliminated that problem by swapping to a universal system based on method-of-avoidance. In some corner-case situations, this system actually reintroduces the lack-of-hierarchy problems from OD&D (“do I duck out of the way or do I tough it out?”), but most of the time there is a clear and obvious saving throw for any given effect.

(4) 4E, of course, took the term “saving throw” and applied it to a completely different mechanic. But if you look at the mechanic which actually derives from pre-2008’s saving throws, 4E did two things with it: First, it inverted the facing of the mechanic. Instead of the defender making the saving throw roll, it’s the attacker rolling against the save.

This is an interesting choice. And to understand why, let’s consider the fact that they could have done the exact opposite with AC: Instead of the attacker rolling vs. AC, they could have swapped AC so that it works like old school saving throws (with the defender rolling against the attacker’s static score).

It’s important to understand that, in terms of mathematics and game balance, this change is completely irrelevant. It has no effect whatsoever.

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, however, the psychological effect of this mechanic is to make the person initiating the action feel passive: They announce the action their character is taking in the game world, but they take no “action” in the real world. Instead, the target takes the real world action.

Or, to put it another way: If you roll for an attack, the emphasis of the game becomes trying to hit people with your sword. If you roll for defense, the emphasis of the game becomes trying to dodge or deflect the blows of others. (If you roll for both, no such emphasis occurs. But this becomes too swingy with D&D’s d20-based mechanics.)

As a result, in 4E, you are always active on your turn and always passive on every other character’s turn. In 3E, on the other hand, the differentiation between the facing of attack rolls and the facing of saving throws mixes the experience up: Spellcasters generally feel more “passive” than fighters on their turn. Meanwhile, players frequently become “active” on other characters’ turns because saving throws will be called for.

Here, as with many of its design choices, 4E is flattening the game experience into something more “consistent”, but also blander and less varied. No player will ever feel as if they “didn’t do anything” on their turn, but the trade-off is that they literally do nothing while everyone else is taking their turn. (Theoretically this is then balanced out with the plethora of immediate actions that 4E adds. BID.)

The second major change 4E implemented, however, was to basically eradicate any clear connection between the action in the game world and the save/defense being used. (For example, a cleric can use his weapon vs. AC, vs. Fort, and vs. Will. Why? Because the mechanics say so.) They embrace this dissociation of the mechanics because it allows them to give every character class the ability to target different defenses without having them actually take different types of actions.

Laying aside the general effects of dissociated mechanics for the moment, this second change has the practical effect of watering down the actual meaning of the various defense scores. When Radiant Brilliance lets you charge your weapon with divine energy and trigger an explosion by hitting your target with a vs. Reflex attack and Holy Spark lets you do basically the same thing with a vs. Will attack… what’s the difference between Reflex and Will defenses? Absolutely nothing, of course. They’re just arbitrary categories that we drop various powers into for an “interesting” mechanical mix.

GM rulings and GM fiat rest at two ends of a single spectrum.

On one end of the spectrum you have GM decisions that are completely disconnected from the existing rules. These are examples of clear GM fiat and the same decision would be made regardless of what rule system the GM was using or even if there were no rules at all.

On the other end of the spectrum you have a very simple and straightforward ruling: The players want to do X. There is a rule for X. We will use the rule to determine X.

In between you have a broad spectrum of gray.

For example, let’s consider the case of jumping across a crevasse. At one end of the scale you have pure fiat: The GM says “yes, you can” or “no, you can’t” based on his desire for them to do so, his whim, or somesuch. At the other end of the scale you have the simple application of 3E’s jumping rule: The GM simply picks up the rule, applies it, and determines whether or not the action is a success.

In between you might have OD&D, which lacks a clear rule for jumping. So the GM says, “He has a Dex of 15. He could probably make this jump easily, so yes.” That seems to still clearly be a ruling; the GM is simply figuring out how to apply the mechanics in a situation for which a clear rule does not exist.

Heading further into the gray we have thinking like: “His character background says that he was an Olympic track athlete, so it makes sense that he should be able to make this jump.” or “Last week he wasn’t able to jump over that pit and this crevasse is even wider, so it makes sense that he won’t be able to make this jump.” Are those rulings or fiat? It’s getting a little harder to judge. (Is the latter a ruling based on a previous fiat? Or just more fiat?)

Another way you can draw the distinction is that it is very easy for rulings to become rules; it is difficult or impossible for fiat to do so.

For example, in a case of pure fiat (where I say “yes, he can jump that crevasse because I say so”) it is very difficult to then make an informed ruling based on that fiat. At the purely local level it probably means I’ll decide that the character can make that same jump again, but whether or not that will have any wider applicability will probably still depend on some arbitrary decision-making.

On the other hand, the more concrete the ruling the easier it is to begin applying it as a rule. For example, if I say “he has a Dex of 15, so he can make the jump”, then it’s relatively easy to apply that as a rule and decide that, yes, the character with a Dex of 16 can also easily make the jump.

If I go even further and base the ruling on something like “I’ll say that you can jump 2 feet for every point of Dex”, then it’s very easy to simply treat that as a rule going forward.

A third way of looking at this is through the lens of consistency: The easier it is to reapply the same decision in a consistent fashion across multiple situations (because it’s based on some sort of meaningful criteria), the more likely it is that the decision is a ruling. The more difficult it is to do so, the more likely it is that the decision is fiat.

Which is one of the reasons why I say that a properly structured rule facilitates rulings.

My next PC:

Taciturn the Dwarf.

So old that he claims the word comes from his name.

(I think he might be a little grumpy.)