Lonely Fun
Seems to me you can’t be a magic-user without also being a little crazy. Getting excited about a bunch of obscure books in the privacy of her study, poring over countless obscure bits of lore, looking unwashed and unkempt… If I didn’t know any better, I might think Wizard was some kind of gamer.
>_>
I’ve used this example before, but I think it’s still relevant here. The engine that drives my character-building is the feedback loop between rules and flavor. They inspire and feed into one another. My thinking tends to run like so:
“OK. I want to play an occultist. He needs special objects to focus his powers. What if one of them was a weapon? Cool, I’ll go with transmutation and choose… What haven’t I used before? Bardiche looks cool. Maybe he can be a traveling executioner. Cool! So with all those dead people in his past, he probably has some ties to necromancy. Maybe this ‘necromantic servant’ power calls upon the spirits of the people he’s beheaded? Neat! OK then, what kind of object do you need for necromancy? This ‘ferryman’s slug’ sacred implement sounds interesting. How did my guy meet the boatman on the river of death then…?”
That’s great fun for me, watching rules cascade into story and back into rules again. It’s also an aspect of that titular “lonely fun” in today’s comic.
The reddit post that got me thinking about this subject lives over here, and it’s honestly worth a read. But for our TLDR purposes, lonely fun can be defined as all the enjoyment you get from gaming that doesn’t take place at the gaming table. We’re talking about the session prep; the character creation; the world building and feat perusal and and spell selection. If you’ve ever spent hours reading through the magic chapter and trying to imagine whether you’re “more of a lighting guy or a fire guy,” then you know what this biz feels like. This is a largely invisible part of gaming, since all of these things are solo endeavors. It’s also a concept driven by notions of the “toyetic.”
Another fine piece of terminology, toyetic is exactly what it sounds like: having the quality of a toy. Imagine your inner little-kid-gamer with books strewn across the floor. That kid is imagining a badass barbarian, but they’re using written description of rage powers and subclasses rather than He-Man action figures. This is one of the basic pleasures of “crunchy systems.” They give you “enough stuff” to play with, and that toyetic quality seems to emerge from snapping all those wonderful rules-Legos together.
And that in turn got me thinking… What would a “non-crunchy toyetic system” look like? Are there fiction-first titles out there that provide all the “stuff” you need to imagine and play in your spare time? I’m intrigued enough by this question that I’d actually like to make it our discussion for today. So hit me with your best shot! What are your favorite systems for providing hours upon hours of lonely fun, and would any of them be considered “non-crunch?”
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Fighting Fantasy has three base stats, a fourth on the outside. With the right choose your own adventure book, you can go on for hours and hours. Low crunch, great fun!
I’d say that old world of darkness has this quality: loads of merits, flaws, powers and specialisms that can come together in very interesting ways but are mostly little modules of relatively simple mechanics. That style has also inspired some homebrew systems I’ve worked on, because I definitely find the idea of low-crunch lonely fun very enticing.
Old World of Darkness is the example I had in my head. All that overblown prose goes a long way to scaffolding your imagination.
Neat! I interviewed at University of Utah of a few weeks ago… They mentioned a CYOA assignment as a successful interactive writing venture. Could be fun to use these rather than the 80s/90s version as an updated example.
I can certainly relate to this. There’s a lot of enjoyment out of figuring out how to make a character fit your ideas and still be rules-legal or have minimal homebrewing required. Or discovering the perfect splatbook option that makes the build come together.
Strange to think, but this feels like the one area where players get to have the same fun as the GM. Imagining what your world and your campaign looks like can be an endless source of lonely fun… But PCs tend to have fewer resources to get that same experience.
Yeah, I do this all the time — I’ve got a whole encyclopaedia worth of characters floating around in my head and in various notes… some of them backup characters I’ve never needed for campaigns, but many I’ve created just for fun. I do find D&D 5e well suited to it… enough crunch to inspire concepts, without being so much work as to suck all the fun out of it.
For less crunchy systems though, I don’t think I could go past Fate… I usually wouldn’t bother with skill allocations or stunts, but writing down five aspects to express the essence of the character… it’s an ideal format in many ways, since it works for pretty much any genre, without needing to engage much in system details.
I just checked… My Google Doc titled “Character Ideas & Builds (PF1E)” is 57 pages long, lol.
Darn, mine is only 28 pages of unused char concepts.
Mine’s plaintext and mixed with my general fantasy ideas (and ideas for all games on either side of the screen), so I don’t know how long it is. I can give some excerpts though:
*druid 0f Olidammara belongs to the “ancient and mystical order of dirty pot smoking hippies” druid/bard hippie build
*robotic dragon paperclip maximizer sleeps on a hoard of paperclips
*fantasy writer Reginald R.R. Regal, or R.R.R.R. for short (a parody of J.R.R.Tolkien and George R.R. Martin), also possibly the middle “R.R.” may stand for “Railroad”. Also a weird fiction writer named Howard Q. Howard (a parody of Howard Lovecraft and Robert Howard)
*Indiana Jones crossed with Tennessee Williams
*bard with the spontaneous healer feat to cheese extra spells known
*elfin walter white who makes blue meth inside of a hollow tree
*Uncle Slam [sic]
*shabbos goy for paladin code
*debauched waterfowl named Swaanesh and the Duck of Blangis
*psionicists are hipsters, that’s why they have tattoos
*What if Francis Drake the pirate and Francis Drake from SETI were the same guy
*Marvin The Paranoid Android knockoff with personality changed to be more like a goth teenage girl from a tv show who can’t even and is embarrassed by their parents
As a wizard main, I can confirm that we are indeed a little crazy. Especially when poring over rulebooks. It’s one of the reasons I love pathfinder so much, all the rules being online makes looking for that one obscure thing that’ll make my overcomplicated plans work that much easier.
Archives of Nethys is indeed a massive gateway drug for this sort of thing, even if I’m only planning to ever play 2e.
During my bored-to-tears-in-a-state-government-office years, the d20PFSRD is what kept me sane. 😀
The feedback loop of narrative and mechanics is absolutely a weakness of mine.
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Some of my more “toyetic narrative” 5e concepts:
Githyanki Arcane Trickster: A doorstep baby raised by village blacksmiths, out to find who she is and emboldened by tales of legendary thieves. Arcane Trickster and Gith Psionics have some natural synergy that tells a story of a character getting better and better at using her psychic powers, especially her natural telekinetic abilities. The Monsters of the Multiverse version of the Gith was even better for that–Reliable Talent+Astral Knowledge would mean getting to call exactly what info she needed from the Astral Plane each day at Level 11+.
I got two games with her across two different campaigns–the first time, the DM noted they couldn’t handle 5 players and I was the one that was most disruptive that game, the second time the DM just ghosted me and either deleted the server or kicked me from it. That being said, the constant telekinesis was fun while it lasted.
Seeing as in hindsight trying to shoehorn what’s basically a Rare ancestry into every pickup campaign I could imagine isn’t likely to work out long-term (and my interest in 5e has waned), I’d say it’s about 50/50 I rework her into a Lashunta and just run her as a Starfinder character. It really depends on if they have an option for the constant telekinesis Mage Hand provides or not–that’s the “toy” I enjoy most about playing her; the rest can be adapted.
Mountain Dwarf Abjuration Wizard: A cautious, well-armored lady who wants to study magic to understand it better and eventually create a magical OSHA, using Arcane Ward to resist damage for everyone. Less interested in this than in the Arcane Trickster; never got around to playing her. Might try running her as a PF2e backliner at some point instead.
Tabaxi Monk: A known 5e cheese build based around the pure power of *go fast*. My idea for one is a guy whose master ran up a waterfall and vanished–and now his goal is to adventure and eventually grow strong enough to run up the same waterfall and find out where she went. His likely fate is to be reworked into a Catfolk Monk in PF2e, though with about the same core concept of “fast, curious kitty training to become even faster”–even without the cheese, I think it might be a fun idea.
“Awakened Simulacrum” Battlemaster Fighter: A character based on a GM-side toyetic concept: a Simulacrum that gained free will and the ability to learn, on the run from her creator. (Then I realized it would be more fun to play myself than as an NPC.) She couldn’t do magic like her creator could (because Simulacrums don’t regain spell slots), but she’d certainly know a lot about it on her quest to gain true freedom from her creator. Reborn seemed like the closest lineage to her concept, even if it needed a little reflavoring. Maybe she’d wield a spear, being the party tank. I got to the interview stage for one 5e pickup group with this one, but ultimately got rejected.
She ended up being one of my favorite concepts.
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As for PF2e: I think this is part of why I’m finding I seriously enjoy the system as a player. Even my first character, a port of the Awakened Simulacrum Fighter idea, has spreadsheets to keep track of my ideas for her.
“Man, this system has a bunch of options, but not sure if any fit–wait, there’s a Versatile Heritage (Reflection) for people copied from other people? AND there’s a bunch of flavorful options for it? I know what I’m playing this campaign. Now I just have to decide whether Mirror-Risen or Clone-Risen fits her flavor better.
Hmm, Simulacrum in 2e works very differently from 5e and can theoretically use magic, even though it would normally just appear as an illusion? Magus sounds like fun, and would give her a better chance to show off the magical knowledge she inherited from her creator that way. And do fun in-flavor things like Ray of Frost. We can maybe handwave some aspects of her nature as her creator trying to recreate 5e/PF1e Simulacrum somehow and failing royally. Laughing Shadow fits the “living illusion” flavor really well, too. Background…hmm. Magical Experiment, to get cold resistance? She was quite literally created through a magical experiment, after all.
Wants reach but one-handed weapons? Why not have her use a scorpion whip? Getting to wield a weapon in the style of RuneScape’s Abyssal Whip sounds nice. Maybe give her a trident as a secondary option as a reference to her original 5e Battlemaster concept. Expansive Spellstrike letting me vector cast area spells through my reach weapon sounds really fun, let’s take that at Level 2.”
So far she’s been probably one of my favorite characters to play, and the lonely fun aspect (both in flavor development and mechanics) have been a weirdly large part of that. Planning out what she’s taking and/or might want to buy at some point absolutely gets the brain wheels turning, as does figuring out how the mechanics might translate to flavor.
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As for the original question: I don’t know, but I’d absolutely love to learn myself.
Do you ever feel like a character is “done” or “solved?” Or is there always a lingering sense that you could tweak a little more or find some hidden option?
“Good enough for now and fun right now” is about where I usually end up with characters I’m currently playing, though occasionally there’s some regret over toys that could have been fun had I built for them (e.g. can’t take Rogue Dedication at 8 despite the fact it would be good on her because 10 starting Dex).
That being said, not all or even most of my characters start in a toyetic way, and it took some time to really develop the taste for it. Some are just concepts I find interesting or have hooks in the world without that much mechanical value. And often even the toyetic ideas just end up as seeds to run in an actual campaign later–there are a few I’ve made into mock sheets, but most just wait.
I will say that the Githyanki Arcane Trickster might be somewhat solved (give or take her next stat roll/point buy if I run her again), but that’s more a function of 5e having comparatively little customization and my not actively playing her right now (meaning I’m not thinking about her mechanics or how she fits into a party much). I suspect it’s likely the spreadsheets for her would return if I ran her again, especially if I end up reworking her core “adopted, vaguely sneaky telekinetic gal with dreams of heroism and iffy bio family she doesn’t know about but wants to” narrative for another system.
I haven’t actually *played* a tabletop RPG in over a decade (sadly), but in that timespan I’ve theorycrafted dozens, if not hundreds, of characters for various games. That being said, a “non-crunchy toyetic system” is thoroughly impossible for me since I loathe rules-lite systems; the entire concept is antithetical to my idea of fun (the more numbers there are for me to tweak and optimize, the more fun I’m having).
Should I read this as a purely “game-as-puzzle” response? Are you optimizing as a numbers problem? Or does the theme of the character have any role in your process?
Character creation is a recreational math probem for me, with the fun coming from the satifaction of eking out every possible numerical increase. I do typically start with a theme and try to optimize as much as possible without losing that core concept, but it’s merely a contrivance used to add extra constraints to challenge myself with—I don’t experience that “feedback loop” mentioned in the blurb above.
Unsurprisingly, I was also largely disinterested in roleplay during games, back when I actually played rather than just hypothesizing endless character builds.
I’m not sure non crunchy lonely fun would exist, at least, not for me
As Monica Gellar best put it. “Rules are good! Rules help *control* the fun!”
I’ve spent countless hours inventing spells and magic items in Ars Magica, or ships, vehicles and robots in Traveller
Without the crunch I’m not sure what I’d even be doing?
One idea floating around in the back of my head was tinkering with Aspects from Fate:
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/types-aspects
They’re not mechanically complex, but they do express character in customizable ways within the system.
This is an intriguing question. One of my groups at the moment plays 1st edition OdM (Oog des Meesters), which is the direct translation into dutch of the german first edition DSA (Das Schwarze Auge). DSA 1st edition is basically a reworked port of D&D. The people that wrote it had an early version of D&D, were not impressed by the fight system, so they reworked that. And it is a very basic system. You just have 6 stats, and three values for attack, defense and armor-protection. No skills, or “non-weapon proficiency”. Your weapon does not matter for your attack, although some weapons might give you positive or negative modifiers on your attack, defense and damage dealt. So after you roil your stats you have some guidelines about what sort of class you can play (with race=class for Elfs and Dwarfs). That’s it. But then the fun begins! As there is no crunch, you can be anything you want! As long as I, the GM, am ok with it, and can find a way to resolve the situation that the thing (item, spell, activity, enhancement) is used, it is not a problem. However, all my players are veteran role-players, who have clear and unambiguous ideas about their characters. And I usually have a good idea on how to work the thing into the game.
I am aware that quite a lot of people need (some to much) advice and support in conceptualizing their characters within a given system. And you can do that with lots of cruch, like in the (A)D&D games. Or with livepath systems like in Traveler, of FASA’s Star Trek. Those livepaths force you to think through the growth/development of your character, and also give you hints about backstory.
Usually systems without mechanical systems you flesh out a character are more dependent on players that have well formed ideas about their characters, and the ability of GM’s to incorporate those ideas into the game. Systems with rules that do have all those enhancements sometimes give players the ability to come up with interesting combos though.
What I think then is that there are several different types of players, and several different systems that appeal to those. Some players do not want any restrictions on what and how they present their character idea. For those players a minimal restrictive rule set, with small, or no, amount of crunch is best. Other players thrive within a sea of crunch, and want to find the best expression of their character idea (which is usually already half-formed based on these rules) within a mountain of crunch.
Just a small illustration of how my players “play” with the system that has (almost) no system. My wife rolled her character, and she decided that she basically was a dwarf in an elfish body. (Yes, comments on contemporary society is part of the game). So one of the things that is described for dwarfs is that they are not allowed to use 2-handed weapons because of their short stature. However my wife read second-hand weapons. So now she can only attack with weapons that are made by her, or with improvised weapons. Also, having the body of an elf, two-handed weapons are less of a problem for her anyway. As there are no rules about use, or abuse of this sort of thing, because there are no rules apart from the combat related ones, this is perfectly permissible within our campaign. But then YRMV (your rpg may varie)
I’m suddenly thinking of Pathfinder and especially Pokémon Tabletop United and Reclaim the Wild. PTU is …overly complicated, to put it nicely (like, “get out the spreadsheets” complicated), and RtW has TWENTY-FOUR stats to assign during character selection.
And as for the non-crunch toyetic idea, I think a game that lets you build companions would be a good fit. Or a PbtA game where your character is a conglomeration of several different playbooks.
I’m sure this is a YMMV issue, but PbtA was in my head as an example of a non-toyetic system. Speaking for myself anyway, playbooks don’t feel rich enough to scratch that lonely-fun itch. It’s like building with Duplo instead of Lego. I think that may also explain why PbtA tends to be a short-form experience of <10 sessions rather than the years-long experience of my Pathfinder 1e megadungeon.
From experience, you _can_ play with PbtA games in that way — but with characters being more interconnected, you’re more likely to be creating entire parties and branching out into world building, rather than creating single characters. I’ve got several such groups… a couple of Masks superhero teams complete with antagonists, a team of Sprawl runners and the megacorps they’re connected to, etc.
That’s quite different from my collection of D&D characters, which are mostly standalone characters who could be dropped into most campaigns with only a little work to customise their backgrounds to fit.
Do you find yourself engaged in this style of worldbuilding as a player or a GM? I know that Blades in the Dark (pseudo-PbtA I guess?) emphasizes the crew as the center of player attention rather than an individual PC…?
As *players* plural, would perhaps be the way to describe it. Basically, creating characters just like in any other game — but since PbtA games tend to emphasize character relationships as a system trait, you end up needing to create multiple characters at the same time… just like a group would do when starting a new game.
I’m less familiar with BitD as a player, but I’ve read it, and I get what you mean about the crew being emphasized as an entity. Toying with that would certainly involve creating a crew, as well as a handful of scoundrels to lead it… picking a crew type (a cult, maybe) and some fitting character playbooks, fleshing them both out, etc.
As one of my side projects, I have been making RPG rules for Lego’s Bionicle toy line, which had a really cool aesthetic and lore. So I suppose that makes this a literally toyetic system.
One signature feature of Toa (the divinely empowered heroes who serve as PCs) are their wide array of unique weapons, created, of course, to sell toys. (Image search “Bionicle” and you’ll see what I mean.) Rather than trying to create and balance a big weapon table, my theory has instead been “Your signature weapon can be whatever you want – they all do the same damage (based on your Might stat). Pick one special property off this table (shielding, transportation option [“I can also use it as a surfboard”], ranged, grabbing, cutting, etc) and add it to your weapon. Explain to the GM how your weapon can use this property.” The weapon properties have very situational mechanical benefits, so the focus is really on coming up with something that the player feels is cool to have and to pose with.
I think this sums up my issues with Pathfinder 2e nicely; there’s nothing there that gets that satisfying ‘click’ of pieces locking together in 2e compared to 1e for me. I like piecing a bunch of separate mechanics to interact in a neat way, and I haven’t gotten much of that.
Best I’ve gotten are ‘get an animal companion whose support ability adds to your damage on a character with lots of attacks like a two weapon Ranger or Monk’ and ‘Swashbuckler with the Investigator archetype so you can roll Studied Strike and know whether to use Confident Finisher or a different one’. There’s just nothing that really grabs me and if there is it’s usually a simple 1 + 1 = 2 combo instead of something more deeply woven.
Though consistently poor luck might also be an issue that’s biasing me- I tend to roll single digits more often than double digits, so just not getting to have your character do their thing is discouraging. Or that I started off with Alchemist in 2e because I liked it in 1e and was very disappointed to find out it’s probably the weakest class (even after some fixes that weren’t around when I first played it, also the not having dex as a primary stat and your weapon proficiencies capping out at expert and also bombs having big 4 level gaps between upgrades and not really doing much more for you than anyone else… yeah, I’m a little bitter).
I’m still waiting for my first real 2e experience. The last one crapped out over the summer. I found my experience in the Pathbuilder app to be a lot of fun as a character-gen aid, but I don’t have much practical insight beyond that.
“Seems to me you can’t be a magic-user without also being a little crazy. Getting excited about a bunch of obscure books in the privacy of her study, poring over countless obscure bits of lore, looking unwashed and unkempt…”
That also works for me even outside games 😀
https://wompampsupport.azureedge.net/fetchimage?siteId=7575&v=2&jpgQuality=100&width=700&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Fnewsfeed%2F000%2F117%2F814%2Fare-you-wizard.jpg
One is never a wizard late, nor is one a wizard early, one is a wizard precisely when one means to 😛
I feel Wizard’s obsessive mania, and I can sympathize very well. Toyetic is a perfect descriptor of my chest full of books. Although these days I’ve been replacing them with files full of PDFs and an endless number of open tabs.
Last time I cracked a book was making an Exalted 2e PC for Laurel. She had a one-shot coming up, as well as a major deadline at work. No time to do character gen, and no easy online resources. It was weirdly nostalgic to flip through paper copies.
My toyetic system is GURPS. If I need to put numbers on something (even non-TTRPG-related things), GURPS has numbers I can use. Of course, GURPS is about as far from a fiction-first system as you can get.
The closest I can get with more fiction-first systems are systems I’d love to play with my gaming group, if I could convince them to try them. Which would require me to run them and also convince them to try something very un-D&D-like.
OK. GURPS me up a numerical representation of gravitational waves. Let’s see this biz at work! 😛
What about the fiction-first systems you’re imagining is toyetic? What is the activity you’d be doing between sessions?
IMO, this is where D20 beats other systems hand over fist. Figuring out ways to put those dudes together in 20 levels is one of the most interesting things about D20. You have to figure it out within the limitations.
In Palladium, this would be Heroes Unlimited which lets you create your own super hero within the bounds of the different character types. I maintain HU is the best cohesive experience in Palladium-although if you want to build a cyborg, better start cracking open the Rifts books.
HERO offers this experience in theory, but since everything is ultimately tied to “active points” (a system abstraction that allows a GM to assign hard limits on how strong things can become), you end up with a bunch of samey powers that have different special fx. The system is infinitely widgety and offers a ton of things you can do; but I have a hard time feeling like doing anything outside of the most min maxed attack you can and than everything else in defense is way less viable.
…sure, you will have OPTIONS. But options don’t matter when you just need that many darned dice to throw at a guy to beat his super defenses.
I always loved the Traveller franchise. Sure, in its original incarnation you could die during character creation, but by the time you’re ready to run, your PCs all have interconnected backstories with a rich history (that, sometimes, is more interesting than the next adventure the GM throws at you).
Shadowrun is pretty neat about tying lore to mechanical options.
Most people are going to want to take negative qualities for more karma (basically build points) and those generally come with either lore hooks or really brutal penalties.
If you’re “in debt”, who do you owe, and why? If you’re a “SINner”, why haven’t you had that liability erased? If you’re “wanted” so badly there’s a minimum bounty of 25k nuyen on your head, whose day did you ruin?
Most of the beneficial options have lore hooks as well.
If you have a tricked out cyberlimb or two, was that for the intimidation factor, because you were too broke to afford the much more subtle bioware options, or something else? If you’re a magic user of any type, you’ll need a tradition; why are you a green mage instead of a more common street shaman?
And of course, the contacts system in general: some of your most important decisions aren’t even directly related to your character sheet. Who do you know, how did you meet, what are they like, where does that “loyalty 6” come from?
There are about a hundred characters on the shared dndbeyond account, most of them mine. Some are theorycraft, others jokes (like Jimli, son of Jloin) that were fun to do a silly build for. A lot of them are characters I built because they seemed fun to play, and just never ended up in a game where I could play them
I don’t play as much 5e now, just one roleplay-heavy (and encounter-light) game, along with playing in a pf2e game and running Lancer. Chances are that most of those characters will never be played, unless I port them to a new system, and a lot of them were built around a fun mechanic or 5e-specific idea I wanted to explore.
But I still get to think about them, write stories in my head about their possible adventures, and, you know, if I ever get a chance to play instead of run, I’ve for this really cool idea for a Lancer character I want to try—
And speaking of theorycraft, did you know that it’s possible to play a character that can never get below a 10 on the die on any skill check in 5e? Scout rogue 11 for reliable talent and then either knowledge cleric 1 or lore bard 3 gets you proficiency in every single skill and expertise in like 6-8 (lore bard takes extra levels to get there but gives the extra expertise)
I would never, ever play this at a table because it would be the absolute Worst to have a pc in the group who can’t get below a 20 on any skill check, but it was fun to go from “how many skills can benefit from reliable talent” to “oh I’ve got more skill proficiencies than there are skills and I forgot to do my background still”
I feel this. I play a Shipwright/Entrepeneur in an Edge of the Empire campaign, and most of my jollies come from working to establish a starship manufacturing company and making ships worth selling to fill gaps in the galactic market.
A lot of what I love doing most is out of session, with my GM over DMs, like coordinating my engineer minion group while I’m out on the… apparent ACTUAL adventure. Once I have enough overhead that I can expand my business, I’ll essentially be bankrolling my party. Like… ALL of the party.
One thing I find fun that’s non-crunch is coming up with new bare-bones concepts for demon lords in the format of the list in the appendix of Fiendish Codex 1, where it’s just a name, a title, a sphere of influence, and the name of the layer where they live; no stats or anything like that