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covok
@covok

I was looking at some older games from the 1990s. I remember now when "Advantage/Disadvantage" systems were all the rage.

Now, when I say that, I don't mean it in the 5e sense where it refers to rolling twice the normal dice and taking the better/worse result. No, I mean "here is a list of good traits and a list of bad traits; you have to pick some from both." That is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think you get the idea. Often, you had an allotment of points and pick Disadvantages would allow you to get more Advantages.

I think you can make a clear line between their rise and fall from prominence to the rise and fall of Aspects/narrative descriptions+resource bonuses.

First, let's discuss why people like Adv/Dis. It's worth noting that D&D's class system always rubbed people the wrong way. It's a gamist concept that places stark limitations on characters for purely game design reasons.

We had seen quite a few deviations, but none of them had caught on for their own reasons. Skill training systems were too cumbersome in play (think Final Fantasy II or Elder Scrolls), Life Paths were popular but were hard to design and balance, etc.

Adv/Dis seemed like a simple, easy universal solution that could be plopped into a game without having to have the entire game built around it. Thus, it was adopted as a way of offering more customization to players.

Secondly, let's discuss why it fell out of favor. Adv/Dis breaks down once you start trying to balance the adv/dis. I don't feel like being exhaustive, but the issue tended to be the case that advantages didn't all have the same use cases, disadvantages would often become a game of finding ones easy to mitigate or that didn't have serious penalties, and some disadvantages actually being advantages (and, more rarely, vice versa).

I'll elaborate a bit. Even if Advantages all had the same mechanical benefit, if their use cases weren't the same then there could be inequity. Maybe they all give +2 bonuses, but if one can almost always apply and the other applies once in a blue moon then that's not balanced. Some disadvantages could be easily mitigated, like having a bad odor, so they are just free points. This was especially true if it required GM enforcement: putting the GM in an awkward situation of having to decide when to punish the player. Other disadvantages had penalties but they weren't serious. Perhaps nobles always look down on you. Well, in our military game, that won't be a big problem. Lastly, some disadvantages were actually advantages. Classic example is a nemesis. That sounds bad, but it means you get more screen time and get to be the focus of the story. That's actually a benefit.

As such, they stopped being the "IT" thing.

Thirdly, let's discuss what Aspects are. I'll define Aspects as an all-encompassing term for game mechanics that can be described as "a word/sentence that describes your character that gives you narrative advantage/disadvantage by being true and can provide mechanical advantage by expending a resource." Fate Core, Nobilis, Chuubo's, Cortex Prime, Fudge, and quite a few other games began using them in the 2000s. They are older, but they got more popular around this time.

Lastly, let's discuss how I think they are connected. Aspects came to prominence, in my mind, because they 1) seem to rectify some of the problems of adv/dis (even if they aren't perfect or the right feel for everyone) and 2) are easy to include with less work on the designer's part.

Adv/Dis are not all balanced? Well, often Aspects are typed (High Concept, Trouble, Relationship, etc) so they have clear use cases. They are also often made to be dual-sided: each one can be good and bad. You want that as an Aspect going against you often gives you more resources for later. Aspects main mechanical benefits are tied to the expenditure of a resource. That stops Aspects from being too useful or too useless: the real draw is the resource management. The mechanical effects are also uniform. In Fate Core, they allow you to introduce a story detail or add +2 to your roll. That's pretty common.

You essentially removed the issue with balance by making everything the same. They have assigned use cases, they push you to make each one double sided so you can get more resources, and their real benefits are tied to a finite resource that players often receive a uniform amount (and, if they don't, that's often to compensate for weaker characters). It is possible to make one Aspect apply too often, but, since that isn't hard corded into the book, it is less of a hassle to just ask the player to rewrite it. It's not like you need to homebrew a new ability.

Secondly, they are just easy to include. You don't need to make a long list of powers and drawbacks. Hell, Fate Core is on the creative commons with attribution. You absolutely can borrow their entire section with well written rules and guidance on making Aspects into your game. I won't like: I've done this multiple times. It's so easy and cuts a lot of time out of development while still giving players a flexible system to customize their characters.

It isn't hard then to see why Adv/Dis is rarer nowadays (it happens and Savage World is a strong torchbearer) and Aspects are...well, were, more common in the 2000s. It feels we moved on from them due to PbtA and FitD in the indie scene. In the main stream, classes have made a comeback due to 5e.

Still, for a time, Adv/Dis was very popular, it hit a peak, trailed off, and it feels like Aspects came and ate their lunch. Then, PbtA did and so on.

That's just my observation, anyway. What do you think? I'd love to hear it!


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in reply to @covok's post:

Nothing wrong with that. This is more a discussion on how I feel one game design element went to the other. No judgement or implication one is better than the other was meant. Aspects can, by their nature, be underwhelming to players who want a more tactile feeling to their narrative mechanics. And that's why I think PbtA and later FitD ate their lunch.

Never even thought about it like this: I use Aspects to this day. Though, I will admit that I have always tried to make them more dynamic, because Aspects have a problem of kind of "rooting" a character by being a single trope.

So what I first did was polarity in Misfortune (circa 2016-2018), where any given Aspect would have a rating that could go up or down, and at the 0 point it flips from a positive Aspect to a negative one and Vice Versa. It was a raw idea, but it's something at least.

I've continued with Aspects in different forms (Likes in Last Little Wonders, Escalations in Saltiest of Sailors), but the only real "advancement" I've made since then has been in my new Story Driver system, where I added a stat called "Resolution" to Aspects (defined as Traits, Drives or Consequences), which is increased by 1 every time the Aspect is used, or by 2 if it makes a negative impact. Then, you can use an activity to do the OPPOSITE of the Aspect, and gain a mark to it or cash out the marks on it as XP, and change the Aspect to reflect how your character grows.

I tried to dabble with Adv/Dis ideas, and they actually make an appearance in Pathwarden, where it's in a place where Adv/Dis still makes sense IMHO: Enemy / Creature design. For player characters, Adv/Dis becomes a silly cat and mouse game of trying to get the most bang out of the least buck, but for NPCs and monsters, optimization is less of an incentive, it's more about just creating an interesting encounter. And classic Adv/Dis is actually perfect for it, since it allows for more varied creatures and a structure without needing to improvise fitting numbers for a creature.

But honestly I gotta look into this again. I think FATE still has a fair amount of players overall because the gaming landscape has moved away from Aspect-style play, and it is retained there, most prominently.

This is a very illuminating post.

I might come back to it. I'm absorbing it a bit.

Your idea for how to make Aspects a bit more dynamic has me intrigued. I am sloshing it in my brain. I almost don't want to bring up what I did in Dicey Fate -- taking inspiration from another game that I can't name -- to make Aspects more dynamic. If only because I don't want to taint the idea you are cooking until it's done. Let me know if you want to know. Because your idea is very interesting. I like it. I want to see how that develops.

Because I can see it being an interesting way of encouraging behavior in a way I hadn't considered. A simple carrot approach that pushes players to use the Aspect in a specifc way. That's really clever. I'll digest that.

As for your idea with adv/dis, I have to admit that I never considered using it ONLY for monster design. You're absolutely right: that completely removes all the problems with the imbalance. You just want to make fun monsters and monsters are like rent-a-cars when you got the $6 insurance so it'd work well there. I like it, I like it.

Also, people definitely still play Fate. When I say PbtA and FitD ate Aspect's lunch, I just mean trends. I personally like Aspects and I'm sure others do to. There are definitely games being made using them. It's just more a trend thing is what I mean.

Nah nah, lay it on me. The mechanic I have laid out for Resolution in Story Driver is effectively finished, the game is literally like two polishing strokes away from being publishable, so I'm not changing it even if you have the best idea ever.

I might still use it in another game tho.

https://covok.itch.io/majesetic-superheroic-roleplaying

I actually made a generic form of Wild Hunt and released that as an SRD on creative commons, if you want to read it.

And this is where Wild Hunt currently is:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwK4Q6DrzODtyW-aajW9vvQoF03zq4NEkCtUeelhFvg/edit?usp=sharing

But basically, the idea is you challenge your Aspects, like in a certain game, to advance them. They add a dice to your Advancement Track that can be then used to test to advance your Character Stats. For Wild hunt, it's more of a PbtA setup. For MSR, it's more like the game that inspired the concept that I can't name. It's very, very similar to something that already exists. I just thought you might like it.

Okay that sounds pretty fun. The fact that you can't mention the name of the game you lifted it from adds to the mystique (lol).

The idea that you have to actively challenge your aspects sounds like a reasonable mirroring point to my concept. So it's similar but different.

I can't check the games now because I'm at work, but I'll try to remember to give them a look later!

Beyond balance issues, I reckon a huge thing that made it lose favor is that in a lot of cases it's just information overload. Like if your chargen-spend points are all vying against each other and every choice is equal to every other, that means that practically you have to keep track of a ton of stuff that all does different things and constantly compare it to everything else. Ends up being a ton of homework, a huge drag during play, a bunch of missed opportunities from people who forget they have shit, or all of the above. (And it gets exponentially worse every time you introduce a splat that has more.)

I feel this may also be why Aspects died off. I know a lot of people don't like Aspects because they're completely freeform. Some of my players during the Petmon Playtest really, really didn't like making them. It was too much for them to come up with when making their character. I can see why PbtA just giving you preset, flavored narrative powers and keeping them to just like 6 or so per playbook (with playbooks being an easy to understand narrative archetype) later took off and ate Aspect's lunch. It appealed to the issue some players had of not wanting to make Aspects entirely on their own for narrative powers.

I'm in a fairly long-running game of OVA, which is a Adv/Dis system, and it certainly requires a lot of collaboration between the GM and all the players to keep things "balanced." It helps that it's not a very combat-focused campaign and we've been going long enough that the GM can work around the characters skills/blind spots, so for instance the vast gulf in combat power between my combat-monster character and the completely non-combatant member of the party isn't a critical issue. When I've used the system for one-shots, it becomes a bit more of a hazard if I don't have time to help everyone workshop their sheets to make sure they have a thing to do in the session and didn't waste a bunch of points on Driving and Knowledge (Street Racing) for a game which is going to be 75% sneaking through a black-site prison.

This is coming second-hand, but I believe there's an Adv/Dis superhero system which has an explicit sidebar on "it's very easy to break the balance wide open, here's exact instructions on how to make a character that can blow up the sun at chargen, everyone needs to be on the same page and agree not to make the sun-destroying-guy" and that colors how I approach these types of games. They are often trivially easy to break if your goal is to just make the most powerful PC, so it needs good buy-in on people trying to make interesting characters who fit together with the campaign and eachother.

I think that was a Greg Stolze game, if I recall correctly. The superhero one with that sidebar. I swear I saw that there.

And I think all generic systems suffer from this issue to a degree. I ran into this issue in a Strike! game recently where the Assassin powers turned out to not be Thief stuff but social stuff. That was on me for not reading. You have to make sure players know what the system is and what will make sense. Don't want people to make a character for a social game and throw them in a dungeon.

I also feel all games that are above a Risus level of complexity will have inbalance and require the group to work out edge issues. From experience, trying to find all the obvious problems is difficult without a lot of playtesting. And, even then, people can be bad faith. In my first game ever where I was player, we had someone lie about dice rolls and lie about what the book said about his powers. Extreme example, but there is also some level of policing. Whether it is bad faith, powers open to interpretation, or imbalance left in by the developers on accident. So, there is nothing wrong with that.

I think being open about the issues is the smartest thing you can do. No reason to lie and keep people from knowing. If everyone is aware of the issues, then the GM and players can plan around it.

I didn't mean for this post to imply Adv/Dis was bad. I just meant I can see why Aspects were invented afterwards. I can see the line.

Also, it's funny you bring up OVA. I was thinking about like two days ago and did a post asking if anyone remembered the game.

As far as generic systems go, I like it. The dice system makes exact probabilities a little funky, but the general gist of "more dice is better, but every additional die is worth less than the previous" creates a decent power curve where a little investment gives you a decent chance with a skill, and more resources invested will raise your average minimum roll a bunch without guaranteeing you'll hit the highest targets every time. The custom attack system is ripe for making some busted nonsense, but also for making weird things that give some more spice to the generally pretty bare combat system.

When I played GURPS it was clear there was a strong skill divide between players who knew the least-bad disadvantages and the "broken" combination of advantages. I think its still a great game if everyone is on the same page. It's cool to make Guy Who Exclusively Uses Kitchen Appliances As Thrown Weapons and be really good at it.

Aspects have a different issue. They rely almost entirely on players maintaining a meta perspective on their characters and invoking them as disadvantages. This tends to run against the grain of immersion for some players, and can be an alien concept for beginners. I've also noticed that beginners have a harder time with the free response of an aspect vs. the multiple choice of playbooks.

Oh yeah, I never meant to say Aspects are perfect or inherently better than Adv/DisAdv. I was mainly discussing how trends evolve and how this trend led to a subsequent trend.

I think the "ivory tower" nature of Adv/DisAdv certainly can be a factor in some people's adversion. On a discord I posted this article, people were discussing how some games would develop metas where people only used the best combinations. Some other felt that Adv/DisAdv is giving a lot of information to the player at once and can be intimidating.

However, one can also argue Adv/DisAdv is a tactile mechanic. Aspect's uniformity and metaelement can be offputting. People may feel more like they are controlling a character rather than playing it, as you alluded to.

As for your next point, I agree. I have seen players struggle to make Aspects. It can put a lot on players to get it right. A PbtA move is a lot more succient and is provided for you. As a narrative mechanic, that can be a lot easier to digest for some.

Still, I want to be clear I'm not saying anything is better than the other. I am just observing how trends bleed into each other.

late to the party but this was a neat article to read! The game I've been working on has Adv/Dis but at the level even of the game fiction - that to have the faerie magic to be a PC, each thing you've gained comes with some tradeoff, some bargain or vulnerability, because that's a political/magic idea in the world.

I don't know that my mechanic to reinforce that fictional premise is going to work as smoothly as I'd like, but I think by making everyone's abilities always have a vulnerability that could come up, and figuring out a way to get that information easily read by the GM at any point, it can make "mixed success"es easier to dole out, and they kind of become like PBTA conditions that can be checked, and/or fictional opportunities to push back without needing to introduce a new threat or obstacle.