Good RPGs for New Players

I'd like to suggest some good "starter" roleplaying games for new players who don't have a group of more experienced players to learn from. There's been huge growth in the number of people interested in playing RPGs thanks to streaming video of sessions and from mentions in popular media like Stranger Things and Community. Not all of those people will be able to find existing groups to join, and many will have to put together a group of people who've never played before to learn together. 27 years ago, when I first started playing RPGs, I was in the same boat, so I'm sympathetic to people facing the challenge of picking it all up on your own.

One, probably controversial assumption, that I'll be working from is that I think newer players tend to appreciate systems that provide lots of clear guidelines for how to do things, rather than rules-light systems that don't provide much guidance for what to do, especially when you have an inexperienced referee who isn't used to making judgement calls and house-ruling smoothly.

I'm also going to stick with systems that are currently in print, because I don't think sending people who have a casual interest in trying roleplaying thanks to a Youtube video on a bug-hunt through secondhand bookshops is a good introduction to the hobby. I'm also sticking to games I've actually played in some form. Also, with the exception of D&D, I'm going to try to stick to the cheaper end of the hobby, since asking someone to drop more than a hundred bucks for something they don't even know if they'll like doing is unfair.

So here's my list:

For science fiction games:

Stars Without Number Revised - Quick character creation and simple rules, while the adventure creation system is easy to use for new referees, and teaches them how to construct stories with minimal fuss. New referees are most likely to have trouble figuring out the experience and wealth subsystems, which are at least clearer than they were in the previous version of the game.

Cepheus - Character creation is a fun minigame, and the premise (you're petty-bourgeois speculators trying to stay ahead of debt in the far future) is easy to get. The text doesn't always explain itself super well, so expect a few delays on your first attempts at creating characters or vehicles, but the rest of the system is fairly easy to figure out. Go with Cepheus over Stars Without Number if you've got a lot of players with STEM backgrounds who want harder SF.

Diaspora - A great system for teaching people how to collaboratively build worlds and stories, with lots of minigames and mechanics that repeat in various ways across them. A great choice if you've got some players with really strong ideas either about the world or their characters going into the game. Some people can't wrap their head around FATE or the mapping components of this game, so if you're going to run into trouble, it'll be there.

For fantasy games:

Beyond the Wall - Get the Further Afield supplement and all the free playbooks as well. The game setup is a fantastic example of collaborative world- and party-building. The fronts and scenario packs are really good for new referees trying to figure out how to link together a bunch of sessions into a story. The simple premise is easy for new PCs to understand. I wrote a review praising it, and I stand by my conclusions there.

Labyrinth Lord + Yoon-Suin - I narrowly favoured this over Labyrinth Lord + Red Tide, but either would be good options. Yoon-Suin gives you a lot of different settings with generators and rules for running each one that differ slightly. While the weirdness might take some getting used to, the system for generating adventures based off of the PCs' social circles is really good, and I'm surprised more game writers don't adapt it. It also gives a new referee a fairly clear idea of how to generate and run the various campaign options it contains.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition - This one's fairly obvious. The part most likely to trip up a new referee is getting a handle on how the encounter-building process works, and learning what the magic and powers let PCs do. Mostly important, Dungeons and Dragons' core books tend to be written with the default assumption that the person picking them up doesn't know anything about RPGs, and while it won't give anyone masterful insights into how to play, the game covers the essentials well.

Assorted other genres:

Other Dust - if space opera isn't your thing, Other Dust is basically the original edition of Stars Without Number (mentioned above), but with mechanics to run it as a postapocalytpic game instead of as a space opera. Same strengths, same weaknesses.

Rifts - Rifts is simultaneously a western game, a fantasy game, a science fiction game, and a horror game all rolled up into one gonzo mess. It's fiddly and complicated. It's also great, and an incredibly popular introductory RPG. I started playing RPGs myself nearly thirty years ago using a derivative of it called "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness" back during the Ninja Turtles craze of the early 1990s.

Further suggestions are welcome in the comments / on G+ as always.

#7RPGs

From Tim Brannan's Other Side by way of Black Vulmea's Really Bad Eggs, comes the idea of posting about the 7 adventure games you have run or played the most. Here's my list, in rough order of amount of time spent playing or running them:

1) Dungeons and Dragons

Especially if you count d20 variants. I've been playing some version of D&D off and on since 1993. Started with the Rules Cyclopedia, moved to 2e, and then abandoned it in the mid-90's only to pick it back up around 2003 and play it more or less continuously until early 2010, when the guys in my group decided they hated 4e and we collectively decided to try other systems. And even then, in 2011 I started playing Swords and Wizardry, and in 2012, Microlite Iron Heartbreakers. Of the 21 or so years since I started playing, I have been playing some version of D&D for about 14 of them.

It's odd because though d20 is inarguably the roleplaying game system I am best at manipulating the mechanics of for personal and team advantage, the D&D family of systems has never been a favourite of mine. Swords and Wizardry and the other rules light variants / retroclones suit my purposes well enough to use for paedogogical purposes. I use them to train people in the basics of playing adventure games with the hope of eventually moving onto crunchier systems.

2) World of Darkness / Storyteller

I used to be much more fond of this family of games than I am now, though I do consider the games to have mostly gotten mechanically better over time. I played a lot of Mage: the Ascension online between 1998 to 2003, which was a gaming drought for me in the physical world, and a lot of Exalted online between 2000 and 2006 as a supplement to it. I also a ran really strange, very short-lived Hunter game when I was 17 that was based on the players playing "adult" versions of themselves (the characters were them imagined at age 25 or so). All told, I've playing Storyteller games for about nine years of my gaming life. Between 2010 and 2011, as what used to be my main gaming group moved away from playing D&D, we took up the new World of Darkness system, though most games were short run horror-themed mortals games. This is part of a general move on my part away from horror-themed games, and away from rules-light games towards crunchier systems.

3) WFRP / 40K

I calculated a year or so ago that if all my current WFRP 2e campaign obligations as both PC and referee are to be fulfilled, I will be playing campaigns of it until sometime in 2015. I started playing it online years ago, in 2005 IIRC, then moved to playing it in real life in 2007, and have been playing it with some group or another ever since. Since then, the only major interruptions in playing some session of WFRP 2e have been to play short runs of Rogue Trader and Deathwatch. I figure it to be about seven years of playing it in some form, typically in biweekly sessions or play-by-posts.

Of all the systems I play consistently, WFRP 2e is the one I like the most, though of course I have a few complaints about it. I like the power curve, I like the setting, I like mechanics for the most part. I wish the gear list was better, though it's pretty good. At the very least it should have the prices for more of the career trappings. I also find the specialties of some skills excessively narrow, though this isn't nearly as bad as in Dark Heresy. When I run WFRP 2e I tend to run it very differently than the people who are my main referees for it, but that's mainly a stylistic issue.

I can't really stand Dark Heresy in many ways, but I have played a ton of it, and I've run games of it, as well as Rogue Trader and Deathwatch. There are many, many elements of DH I would rewrite / have rewritten for my own games, to the extent that I'm almost playing a different game. Still, I love the setting, and the actual campaigns were great.

4) Heavy Gear

From 1994 to 1999 Heavy Gear was one of my go-to science fiction games, along with Alternity. One of the great things about the game was the incredible buy-in to the setting from the group I played with for most of my adolescence, at least partially due to the war game elements and the tie-in computer games. PCs went out and bought, and then read, setting books and supplementary material, and I could drop casual references to other elements of the setting in and rely on the PCs catching them. It was a golden era of young gaming.

The game where I got into the knife-fight at the table with one of the PCs was a Heavy Gear game in summer 1998. Superficially this probably seems like it coincides with the end of my RL gaming for about five years, but in actual practice we played for another six months or so (mostly Alternity at that point), and it was only at the tail end of 1998 that we ceased meeting regularly. When I reflect on Heavy Gear now, it's always with a bit of melancholy and nostalgia, and I feel like I can't really go back to this system and play it in a clear, adult way. Playing Heavy Gear basically ruined me for any other mecha game, and I've never gotten back into the genre in the way I did when I played it as my preferred game in my teenage years.

5) The BRP family (Call of Cthulhu, Openquest, Mongoose Runequest 2)

It's odd that the family of systems I like so much crops up so low on this list I suppose, but that's because I discovered it so late. I first played Call of Cthulhu at Giant Space Telescope Con in 2009, playing the sonar operator in Grace Under Pressure. It was also the first time I played a prewritten module. Upon discovering the then-newly-released Mongoose Runequest 2, and Openquest, these systems won my heart. I've played a bit of each, though nowhere near as much as D&D, obviously. I hope that over the course of the rest of my gaming life, this ratio will even out, or even shift in favour of BRP.

6) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness / Rifts / Heroes Unlimited / Recon

The first roleplaying game I ever played, from 1991 to 1994, off and on. I am a self-taught gamer who came to roleplaying through an adventure game that was not D&D, both of which are somewhat unusual as I understand it from hearing others discuss their backgrounds. TMNT was great, though the kids I mostly played it with were my toxic and horrible neighbours, who taught me at a very young age how terrible people can be in groups. I'm not saying my interest in group dynamics in adventure games from a set of experiences I had when I was eight, but that interest is definitely informed by them.

Heroes Unlimited and Rifts were grafts onto the same group, and while I am still nostalgically fond of the systems, I experience even less desire to play them. Of all these games, only Recon, which I played later, with the same adolescent group that I played Heavy Gear with, is one that I'd like to revisit. It wasn't the first military game I played, but it was the first one that was based on a real conflict and that emphasised the complexities of military activity, and that wasn't really heroic.

7) Everything Else

At this point, the list starts to break apart into a basically arbitrary selection. Any of Diaspora, Traveller, Burning Empires, Burning Wheel, Unknown Armies, FUDGE, Star Wars D6, Shadowrun, Nobilis, Stars Without Number or Alternity would qualify. I've probably spent a bit more time running Alternity or Unknown Armies than the others, but Traveller and Stars Without Number are systems that I use as supplements to other games I'm running (the world generation systems, in particular). Most of these are games that I've run or played in one-shots, or short series of games, or campaigns that failed to launch, or that I draw on as supplements or reference books. There are a couple that I would love to play more often than I do (Diaspora, Stars Without Number and Traveller) but can't fit into my available gaming time.

Tests of Skill and Tests of Chance

I propose that challenges where resolution is a matter of mere luck should feel different than challenges where resolution is a matter of characters' skills interacting.

By "feel" I mean that the actual steps players and referees go through to resolve the situation should differ. 

Specifically, for challenges where luck is the decisive factor in what the consequences are, player-character agency and control should be decreased, and either referee control or the random factor should increase. Whenever the PCs are not taking action or making choices that affect an outcome, resolution of that outcome must be quick, but I would propose that either a slight delay, or an initial concealment of the results followed by the revelation to the players helps build suspense and excitement. For example, when rolling saving throws in a D&D-like game for PCs or small groups of important NPCs, you ought to try to resolving them one at a time, starting from the person most likely to pass the saving throw and progressing in order of descending probability. I started doing this a year or so ago, and have stuck with it ever since for its suspense-building effect at the table.

Another option is for the DM to roll all the saving throws at once secretly and then announce the various characters' fates in order of severity of consequences, which has a similar effect of mounting tension. One good thing about this method is that players will quickly grasp this patterns, which exacerbates the tension even further - knowing that the further along it takes before their fate is announced, the worse it will be. Even better, once this pattern is known, you can occasionally invert it to preserve the element of surprise.

Tests of luck are about the panic of suddenly having your control of a situation reduced or taken away. Used too much, they discourage planning and engagement with the fictional reality, since doing so doesn't affect one's chances of failure or removal from play. This is one reason I encourage you not to use saving throws for resolving too many effects in D&D like games. It's also why I think that any means of resolving skill tests ought to allow PCs to seek out bonuses and avoid penalties.

Tests of skill need to emphasise at least character, and preferably player-character, competence and agency. They should involve meaningful choices not only prior to resolution (viz picking the relevant skill or action to attempt), but during as much of the process as possible. These choices could be things like position during an attack (for a miniatures-based combat system like d20 or 4e), types of attacks or effects applied to opponents (as in Mongoose Runequest 2 and Runequest 6's combat maneuvers), resources to be expended in accomplishing a goal (WFRP 2e's Fortune Points), applicable bonuses or penalties (Openquest and the 40K adventure games), etc. They may be formal and explicit within the rules, or they may be informal "bonus grubbing".

If they are informal, I recommend the referee spend some time prior to the test explaining what kinds of things they see as causing bonuses or penalties to be assigned to the roll. Openquest does a good job of this, by laying out three basic conditions that create bonuses or penalties (Planning and preparation or the lack thereof; strong roleplaying and engagement with concrete details; the intrinsic ease or difficulty of a task), while in my experience WFRP and the 40K games are awful for this, providing much clearer guidelines for penalties than bonuses, and thereby encouraging penalties to be assessed more frequently than bonuses except in the handful of specific cases where there are clear guidelines (mainly combat).

Tests of skill can be extended tests, where success accumulates bit by bit over time, often involving teamwork. Despite this, I often see means of resolving these kinds of tests that basically allow only one person to make a meaningful choice (i.e. WFRP, where all other PCs do is add a straight 10% bonus to the test if they have the relevant skill), or that frontload all meaningful decisions at the very start and then simply become tests measuring the duration of the work (almost all crafting rules I've ever seen do this).

As a contrast, I would point to the resolution system of a game like Diaspora, where other PCs tag tests with aspects to provide bonuses or penalties, but there are a set categories of types of aspects allowed (zone, personal, etc.) with a limited number of "slots" in each category (one, in most cases). To tag a test, they must also expend a valuable personal resource (fate points). On top of this, they also have the option of making a test themselves (one relevant in the imaginary world) and transferring their bonus success levels to the other test. An "extended" test is one where one is trying to build up a certain number of success levels, which can be spent, IIRC, to reduce the time taken, to improve the final result, etc. This is a structure rich with relevant, meaningful choice throughout it that emphasises player-character agency and skill, and many other games would benefit from adopting a set of principles about how assistance works that are like it, even if they didn't want to formalise it in the same way.

The results of tests of skill should also be relatively enduring, while tests of luck should be fleeting. While I don't uncritically accept the principle of "Let it Ride", where a skill is tested once per scene or situation and that result applied to all possible uses a character makes of that skill, I do think it's preferable to the "Make a Perception test. Now make another one. Now another. Again." school of thought. My main objection to the Let it Ride concept is its stasis across a scene. I think that the results of tests of skill should endure until circumstances change meaningfully. My criteria for meaningful change are not meant to be exhaustive or definitive, but include "a different bonus or penalty would apply than when the previous roll was made", "another character's actions have enabled or interfered with your ability to execute the skill", or "You need to expend a limited resource each time to make this roll"

I'm willing to allow that in combat and certain other rapidly developing situations with lots of PCs and NPCs making decisions that interact with one another in complex ways may make the timeframe for meaningful change into a few seconds long, while in other situations, it may be hours or days.

The important thing is to avoid multiple tests for closely related goals where the circumstances are stable. If you are looking for Bill and Joe in the crowd, then one test is sufficient, rather than two (if this is an opposed test, because Bill and Joe are both hiding, then they should each test against the same roll, rather than having two separate roll-offs between the PC and Bill or Joe).

As part of that endurance, tests of skill should also not be fragmented across multiple PCs unless absolutely necessary. If the entire party is looking for Bill and Joe in the crowd, then four to six Perception rolls (plus whatever Bill and Joe are rolling in opposition) is tedious, boring, and ensures that success is simply a matter of rolling and comparing dice results for ten minutes rather than making meaningful choices. It boggles my mind sometimes that RPGs take the activity of an isolated individual as the paradigm of action resolution, when the actual situation is almost always a group of PCs assisting one another. A simple kludge to cover this situation is to allow PCs to provide bonuses to one another for teamwork, though this only slightly ameliorates the fundamental problem.

Skill challenges in 4e were problematic for many reasons, but there is an interesting idea that I would preserve from them. The idea is that during a skill challenge (where each of the PCs goes in order rolling a skill trying to accumulate successes), the same skill cannot be used by two PCs who are adjacent to one another in turn order. While in a skill challenge this is an artificial constraint that serves to highlight the gameyness of the whole process, I think combining it with the simple bonus kludge would push PCs to take more agency.

The basic idea for something like trying to find Bill and Joe would be that the PCs are all going to work together. At any time, one of them can make a Perception check to look around, but only one PC can do this (perhaps the check happens each round and each time the identity of the PC making it can change). The other PCs will be assumed to be assisting when that happens, and will therefore add a small bonus. If they want to contribute a larger bonus, they must use different skills, powers or tactics to create bonus-worthy conditions for that single check. Similarly, if the Perception check does fail, it's up to the other PCs to use their skills to create a meaningful change in circumstances to allow another check to be made.

I don't claim to have the complete solution here, nor to have exhausted all possible options, but I encourage you to test these out and to develop new solutions based on the underlying principles laid out here.

I Don't Own Stars Without Number Anymore

A friend of mine is going up north to teach English to ESL students in Kangirsuk [1], in Nunavik in northern Quebec. She sent out a call for people to donate small items like art supplies etc. that the students could use to learn English (most speak the Nunamvimmiutitut dialect of Inuktitut and/or French) and I decided to donate a roleplaying game (plus dice), since Malcolm Sheppard has been using them to teach literacy to young people and adults. The students are at about the age that many gamers enter the hobby (Grades 3 and 4 - I started playing when in Grade 3 when I was 8).

Finding a roleplaying game that I hope would appeal to young people from a non-Western background is harder than it sounds. The vast majority of fantasy games have Europe-like settings, feature art that is entirely white people, and don't provide a lot support for anything other than killing things and the accumulation of wealth and power. These games are more or less fine for an audience with a cultural background that prepares them for these things, but I suspect they're of much less interest to a non-Western audience (just as most of us are not watching Nollywood films). I wanted a game where there was at least the possibility of nonviolent objectives and goals, since the kids are young enough that their parents probably won't approve of imaginary murder. As well, I wanted a game that would teach kids how to roleplay, rather than assume they knew how to, and that would provide them with a ton of tools to do so.

I decided Stars Without Number would be the ideal game in my collection for a lot of reasons. The rediscovery of lost worlds and cultures in the default setting offers an overarching non-violent goal for PCs to pursue. The tools for building worlds, aliens, etc. were fantastic and simple, and should be easy for new gamers to learn. The actual rules are simple and sensible. But what really sold me was the inclusion of tables of non-Western names and the art featuring non-whites fairly frequently. Though the names don't include Inuit ones, they do include specific tables of Arabic, Japanese and Nigerian ones, which I hope will indicate to the Inuit kids that you don't have to be a white guy to be adventuring space heroes. The fact that it's one book was helpful too, since transportation space will be limited.

On the chance that the kids wouldn't like that particular game or she couldn't take the physical book, I loaded up an 8GB thumb drive with pdfs of other games (all freely and legally available), including the Swords and Wizardry core rules and the Quickstart, all the free mini-adventures available for Swords and Wizardry, the art-free version of Mutant Future, Dark Dungeons, the free pdf version of Stars Without Number, and Infinite Stars. I had the Eclipse Phase pdf on there at one point, but took it off because I figured it'd be too mechanically complex for young kids, but that left me with very few good, free, science fiction games. Openquest has a free pdf available, but the harpy monster in the back of the bestiary has exposed breasts. I also loaded up tons of OSR-related material, like free NPC generators, hex templates, etc. These will require the kids to have access to a printer to make full use of, but I figured I'd err on the side of more rather than less.

And that's why I don't own Stars Without Number anymore.

Roleplaying: Beyond Talking

I was participating in a discussion about some really interesting stuff over at Gaming as Women, but I was asked not to sidetrack stuff, so I'll talk about it here instead.

One of the most useful high-level insights I ever had as a DM and as a player was to realise that roleplaying is about more than just talking, and that engagement and interest in the game is not measured solely by how frequently and loudly someone speaks at the table. While this is one measurement, it's not the only one, and I think games are diminished insofar as the group playing them tries to restrict its activity to just this.

I came to this realisation a few years back, when I started playing in Economy of Force, a WFRP game Jude Hornborg of Liber Fanatica has been running off and on. In it, I play Siegfried Hausmann, a physician from Kemperbad, and one of the two class A shareholders of the Steiner-Hausmann Trading Consortium, a subsidiary of the Hofbauer-Bodlestein Trading Guild's Wurtbad subsidiary. One of the amusing recurring pieces of game play is that Siegfried maintains the company's accounts and is the only person who ever knows exactly how much gold is in our coffers (to the occasional consternation of the non-voting class B shareholders aka the other PCs, who are required to pool their funds into it).

I spend a fair bit of time keeping our money supply straight using double entry book-keeping. The effort only rarely comes up in-character, but when it does, all the quiet poring over columns pays off. People hurl accusations of embezzlement, characters go wild with the abrupt realisation that we are extremely rich, or the party becomes frantic with approaching penury. All of this drives interactions, schemes, etc., despite much of it deriving precisely from not talking a lot about how much money we have at any given point.

This kind of thing actually crops up a lot in Traveller and any campaign that features economic interactions that are tracked precisely, but there are plenty of other kinds of activity like it that are not economic. Mapping, keeping track of supplies and schedules, and choosing spell lists are three obvious ones, and others are created by the system or the style of the group's play. I think that rather than deprioritising these and treating them as unpleasant, subsidiary effects of talking and "playing" that have to be pawned off due to simple necessity, that we ought to approach them as ways of enriching the game, assign them to players who find them interesting, and use them to keep PCs occupied when other characters are in the spotlight.

While the activities I prefer are ones that derive from a very detailed engagement with the environment and the challenges it poses, this kind of activity can go far beyond that. In a game with narrative-driven mechanics like the FATE 3.0 family, PCs might be encouraged and rewarded for creating brief descriptions of features of the world that can occur later. For example, in Diaspora, PCs could be encouraged to write short descriptions of 30-50 words of some feature of the world with say, 3-5 related aspects. This might be a character, an astronomical feature, a piece of technology, etc. After creating it, they would be allowed to call on one of the aspects once whenever plausible, and then to hand it off to another player, who can in turn call on one of the unused aspects once before handing it to another player, etc. until all the written aspects are used up, whereupon the item becomes the common property of everyone to draw on as relevant.

In Emern, I tried to do this by assigning the PCs roles, including surveyors, quartermasters, guards, the leader, etc. Each one had an assigned duty that really didn't require a ton of interaction with other PCs (though others could be drawn into it), but that had them make rolls and meaningful choices (whenever possible, the Emern game isn't perfect on this, though it's something I shall strive for in future games). Incentivising this with XP, both individual and collective, encourages people to engage in these activities, though I recommend low values so that they don't overwhelm the value of treasure, monster slaying and progressing through the story.

Players come in many different types, almost all of which can contribute value to the game even if they are not the most social types. I think that limiting or prioritising player engagement through one particular mode (talking in character) excludes and drives away plenty of players who could really help create a fun game, and it could even give more social players a respite for nights when they're feeling off or out of it for some reason.

Diaspora's Dynamic Relationship Maps

Diaspora is the only FATE game I really like, and I've been thinking of writing a review of it sometime. It rationalises the stunt system to avoid the massive lists of Spirit of the Century and Starblazer Adventures, it has has a good balance between its toolbox qualities and predefined content, something a lot of FATE games struggle with, and it has a lot of interesting innovations in how it presents information to players.

One innovation is the use of relationship maps as conflict maps. Relationship maps are fairly common tools these days for managing NPC casts, and Hack & Slash has a good breakdown of how to use them here. I learnt about them in 2001 from Unknown Armies 2e, and I've used them ever since when I need to keep track of dynamic social situations. By providing a reference for how NPCs feel towards one another and what their goals are, a relationship map allows you to improvise more effectively than if you're trying to juggle it all in your head.

A relationship map of the type that H&S is talking about, or that Unknown Armies teaches you to make (a "web map", I'll call it), isn't really a direct artifact of play though. That is, you don't lay it out on the table and interact with it. It's meant only for referees to consult and update. Stylistically, they tend to present individuals, groups or things as the basic units with attitudes and goals forming connections between them. Diaspora breaks with that and encourages you to map the zones of possible attitudes and goals and then to place the PCs and NPCs on the map as appropriate. It provides clear rules for moving between one zone or the other and for interacting with others (which involves attempting to move them from zone to zone). It provides some examples of multiple layouts, and encourages you to come up with your own. You can see a sample of what one looks like on rpg.net here.

I haven't experimented too much with this system, but I think it's a very strong idea with a lot of potential. I'm in favouring of mapping social situations for the same reason I encourage people to do overland mapping, because it turns what would otherwise be a shapeless succession of vignettes into specific, meaningful choices. I think that the zone concept is particularly valuable because it emphasises individuals' movement between attitudes and towards goals. I don't consider the other type of relationship map useless, but I think they do different things. In fact, they complement one another in most situations where you'd need one or the other.

A zone map and a web map can be extremely useful through their contrast. Web maps are great for hierarchies and other rigid kinds of relationships, especially if the relationships as a whole are not primarily goal oriented. For example, I would build a web map to represent a feudal hierarchy's obligations to one another. A zone map would be a useful complement to that when the PCs decide to rebel against their feudal lord, and need to plan or track where everyone in the hierarchy stands on that issue, and how well they're doing gaining them as allies or enemies. You could even drill down so that a zone map exists for each box on the web map, with the zone progress determining exactly how effective or productive each relationship is, which might be a little unwieldy, though you could probably reuse the map a couple of times for similar relationships.