RPGaDay2025 - 12 - Path

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Path. 

There's an element in game design that really turns me off, partly because I've increasingly lost interest in complicated mechanics and minutiae, something that my younger self would have lapped up.

Hang on, you say, but don't you love Traveller?

That's definitely a "Yes, but..." response. Traveller hides its complexity in procedural subsystems, which are mostly pretty logical. The character generation has pretty much everything you need for any character across two pages for each type, in clear step-based tables. Starship design is a menu-based system (you don't have to use formulae for power points and more these days) and there's a variety of spreadsheets out there that make it really easy to do. The task system itself is simple and elegant (although I prefer the more precise way that it was done in MegaTraveller and the DGP Task system for Classic Traveller). There's a clear and simple path through each of these processes.

So what do I mean?

I don't like the legacy of D&D3e with the whole process of feats and paths to create the optimum character. This continues through to the current design. I really don't want to read through lots of lists of things that are usually presented in text blocks with the mechanical impacts hidden away. I tend to skim them or phase out when reading because I find them tedious. Same with bestiaries and spell lists.

I loved the simplicity that Cypher presents itself, both in character generation and the game engine itself.

I am an adjective noun who verbs.

And then you hit pages of details - the paths that characters will develop on - behind all that which just lost my interest. It took me a while to realise that as a GM I could just skim this and hand it over to the players. I ended up doing the same with my D&D5e campaign. The players took this on.

I get lost in the trees and can't see the path through the forest as a result.

And yet I know this kind of detail and options give some people a lot of delight. Several of my friends love to go through this in detail and build their perfect, optimised character. To them, this approach gives a clear path to the character that they want.

Perhaps it's a legacy of my earliest games being Chaosium's BRP-based games and Traveller? They didn't have the same kind of progression. BRP was based on skills through experience and training and Traveller, well, once you generated a character, that was pretty much it for development originally. Their core engines were simple.

And yet, I really enjoyed running D&D5e and I've actively considered using Numenéra for running the Ultraviolet Grasslands.

12 August 2025