The Business: The Death Grip of the RPG Design Cargo Cult (Part 1)

RPG design is, and has been for generations, trapped in a Cargo Cult. It's even worse in videogames than in tabletop games. To summarize: it is presumed, without the least bit of thought, that you have to have character levels and often literal classes complete with inflating stats as you go as well as gear and minion management.

It's not.

Videogames are all but entirely yoked to this cult. Tabletop games have long had competing paradigms, but they never married those designs to a model of gameplay as compelling as Dungeons & Dragons so they are routinely ignored by videogame developers- especially in AAA development. Below I'll name the most significant alternatives to D&D's Class/Level paradigm.

Classic Traveller has no Classes, or Levels, and the only way you're going to make your character's stats go up after you enter play it to spend lots of money and time on training- just like real life. (That means downtime, when your man isn't available to play, by the way.) Otherwise, it's about having the right gear and making the right connections to get ahead, and narrative logic is absent; this game wears its wargame roots proudly.

You need only two six-sided dice to play, so you can raid your normie pal's Monopoly box and be good to go. You can fit an entire PC on a 3x5 index card with room to spare, and rolling up a new man takes five minutes at most. Most of the game revolves around tossing two dice, adding modifiers, and attempting to hit a target modifier. The Referee handles all of the modifier tracking, so you as a player need only do the dice rolling. That's normie-friendly game design.

Champions is the premiere superhero RPG. No Classes. No Levels. It's notorious for being daunting for newbs and normies due to it being based on a LEGO-style philosophy. The game's core mechanics are sound and simple--you need to raid a Yatzee box and you're good--but the daunting part is that you literally build your man out of stats- especially superpowers.

In practice, most players use the full HERO game system and have a preferred edition--commonly 4th, 5th, or 6th--and that adds to the barrier to entry issue (in addition to the costs, assuming you're buying a physical rulebook).

HERO is also capable of handling other genres; this scope creep became necessary due to supeheroes being a sort of "cover-all", especially in teams modelled after the Avengers or the Justice League, which makes it easy to use HERO for everything- not a small benefit.

Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system is the power behind the enduring horror classic Call of Cthulhu, based off Lovecraft's works, and it too eschews Classes and Levels. You'll need the full D&D dice set, but you will play very differently.

This is not confined to Cthulhu. Runequest, Pendragon, et. al. all work using variations of this game engine. See for yourself. They all play differently despite using the same core due to game-specific subsystems such as Sanity in Cthulhu, Pendragon's Passions, and so on prompting gameplay that conforms to the genre of the source material.

BRP (as the core engine is called) also lends itself to cross-genre play, and there is publisher support for doing so to some degree (if you need it). The game itself is friendly to normies, with game mechanics directly tied to concreate conquences in gameplay. It's very easy to digest as you go.

Good game design is not hard anymore to comprehend. Game mechanics must directly associate with, and correlate to, immediate and concrete consequences on gameplay. Game mechanics and concepts must be easy to comprehend and learn as a new user goes, during play. The game's core play paradigm has to exist, has to be something an average Kindergardener can grasp without issue, and therefore has a default structure to it that makes it comprehensible as a game- something with stakes to risk along with win and loss conditions.

There is nothing in that preceding paragraph that requires D&D-derived elements. Yet they persist. Why?

Dopamine.

Literally, folks. That's the reason is that leveling up is a thing, such that most who only do videogames literally think that it is either the entirely of the game or the majority of it (whether they like it or not), and I'll get more into this tomorrow.

If you want your own (legal) copies of the aforementioned games, hit the images above and pick your format; otherwise, hit up your local stores, including the used book stores.

There's also plenty of other lesser-known games that are very good games but don't get the attention. Feel free to name-drop (and link to) any other games of note that don't conform to the dominant Cargo Cult paradigm below.