FS3

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in FS3:

But I think that's exactly the problem that some folks are complaining about. He "should have" beat you. He certainly "shouldn't have" lost 5-0. Just as @Auspice's char "should've" cleaned my char's clock in the marksmanship contest.

I don't think I expressed myself clearly. What I meant to say was that I had a 2-dice edge over the other PC on every roll, but that does not mean I should have blanked him out. I think I had 8 dice and he had 6. He should have taken one, maybe two rolls, but he took zero: I made 10 successive successful contested rolls.

Also, my message was kind of satirical, kind of mocking. So, don't take it as a serious knock on FS3. It could have been blind, dumb, Gany-loving luck.

[mietze]

@WTFE said in FS3:

FS3 is now, confusingly, on its third major version (and were there minor versions in between?). This is the third version made by the same person who seems to have the same specific goals in mind (very narrow subset of genres, an insistence on low numbers of rolls while at the same time relying on purely stochastic processes, etc.).

This seems kind of a petty bitch to make, like you have an axe to grind with this specific person. Did you not mean to bitch about zOMG 3 MAJOR VERSIONS in the last 10 years? Because that's where I'm getting those feels from.

I get that for whatever reason you hate this system. More power to you. It just seems a little weird. Especially the hate towards something that's available for free, as a dice system, for game runners to use or not at their discretion.

[Arkandel]

@mietze I'm still mad Dungeons and Dragons didn't stop with AD&D.

The A stands for Advanced, motherfuckers. What else do you want? It's advanced! Leave it be!

[Ganymede]

@mietze said in FS3:

I get that for whatever reason you hate this system. More power to you. It just seems a little weird.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that @WTFE has no love for FS3 2E because it was hard to succeed in it. Apparently, @faraday fixed this in FS3 3E, which @WTFE has no experience with. But he'll still knock a game with FS3 because of his experience with 2E.

This is fine, actually, given that FS3 3E is only available on BSG:U. So, if another game has FS3, it is probably 2E. The beef isn't weird to me -- I think I get it -- but it's hard to sift through it because @WTFE apparently doesn't communicate clearly.

[kitteh]

Yeah, I do have to say BSGU kind of spoils me. Any criticisms anyone wants to make, it's obvious she's doing tons of work to improve things.

I'm apping on a FS3 (version whatever every game ever has used) game and the 12-point skills in 4 tiers still kind of give me anxiety. Love Faraday but no idea what she was smoking there

Edit: I suspect that old system also has to do a lot with @WTFE's seemingly berserk hatred of it and insistence that people sucked at things even though Faraday says success % was always high. The issue was probably all the generic games using it having really terrible guidance for players / GMs on skill ratings. How do you balance a combat when one guy is skill 1 and one guy is skill 12?

[faraday]

@Ganymede said in FS3:

Apparently, @faraday fixed this in FS3 3E, which @WTFE has no experience with. But he'll still knock a game with FS3 because of his experience with 2E.

But that's the weird thing... I really didn't change the dice mechanic appreciably in 3rd Ed. I mean, yeah, a bit? I think overall it shifted percentages like 10%? But that doesn't feel like that's enough to explain such a dramatic shift between the experience WTFE describes and what you've described. It also doesn't match up with what I've personally experienced in FS3 games - even ones I haven't run personally. So... I'm kinda at a loss?

@kitteh said in FS3:

12-point skills in 4 tiers still kind of give me anxiety. Love Faraday but no idea what she was smoking there

:grins and shrugs: It seemed like a good idea at the time? I mean all I really did for 3rd Ed was collapse two ratings into one.

2nd Ed     3rd Ed
1-2     -> Amateur
3-4     -> Fair
5-6     -> Good
7-8     -> Great
9-10    -> Expert
 11     -> Elite
 12     -> Legendary

I've already had some folks lament that there isn't more differentiation between character skill levels in 3rd Ed. Almost everyone's at Good/Great/Expert in their relevant combat skills. But when there were more levels, people lamented that it was too confusing and unclear what each level meant. (Despite my attempt at making detailed skill ratings.) Kinda feels like a darned if you do darned if you don't situation

[kitteh]

@faraday

Oh, I mean I acknowledge that's just my personal feeling on it, but to me the 12 thing was just far too daunting, largely from a chargen perspective. I'd always run into (and I'm facing it right now) the standard situation where you have a bunch of 6s, and the game lets you have X (often 3, maybe this is your default?) skills at 7+. So you bump your big focus to 7. But you have some points left. Do you go to 8, or 9? Well, you probably should, since if you don't you'll never get there in game, right? But then you have a bunch of 6s and then one 9, and it looks really skewed on your sheet (like a middle finger sticking up - that's not metaphorical, its what it looks like when you've got a bunch of 6s and then one 9 sticking out 3-dots higher)! And that makes me feel like I'm twinking, having this one skill so skewed and higher than the others. So maybe I lower it.

And then everyone has 12s and I'm useless.

Obviously, you've moved beyond this so no reason to harp, but... yeah. I'm not exaggerating when I say it would give me anxiety

Re: people wanting more differentiation, I only think that makes sense in a system where there's more progress. If you have both vast skill gaps and almost no advancement, you're going to end up with PCs who basically can't be in the same room with each other without breaking things. Permanently.

[Thenomain]

@kitteh said in FS3:

And then everyone has 12s and I'm useless.

In other games we call this the Dino Problem. That is, people who have been around enough that they can take, say, their '9' skill and make it a '12', and new people feel that they have no chance to compete. The people who are this dedicated are unlikely to let their characters die and are unlikely to move on, they sit there and grab the easy food and you feel like you're a mammal dodging between their legs for crumbs.

This isn't always true, and may not be an exact metaphor for FS3.

[faraday]

@Thenomain With the FS3 defaults, you can start high, but you're not likely to raise your skills high after chargen because of the high XP costs. It takes almost a year to go from 8-12 in just one skill, even if you dump every XP you earn into it.

It's done that way precisely to avoid the dino problem, which was always one of my pet peeves... I mean, let's say the game's been open for 6 months. ICly, the newbie hasn't come out of suspended animation right? They were doing stuff during those 6 months too. I'm all right with giving veteran players a small advantage considering they devoted time to the game, but I don't like giving them a significant leg up. New players should start out on more-or-less even footing. That's why the XP system is the way it is.

But again, that's the default. A game can tweak those numbers and give themselves a dino problem if they really want to.

[kitteh]

@Thenomain Sure, but on a lot of FS3 games it happens on day 1, and there's no catching up, which is why it can be so anxiety inducing. You're playing twink chicken, sort of, trying to guess the value you can take that will make you relevant in the area you want your character to be good at while not looking so twinky staff gives you the stink eye and labels you a problem player ahead of time. The HUGE range (1-12) makes that guessing difficult.

In comparison, in something like WoD you can grab a 3 or 4 and yeah, maybe some dude has a 5, but it's not that big a difference and you can buy the stat up in probably a month if you want. The first part is true in the new FS3 (which is good), though being able to catch up if you want is not.

[Seraphim73]

@kitteh I've always had a similar problem--I decide to "play it safe" and stay under the chargen max (whatever the Staff has decided that to be) because I don't want to be too twinky, and then my "specialist" is objectively worse (not a whole lot worse, given that it's usually 1-2 dice, but still worse) than other specialists because I didn't min-max at the game's start. And because of the linear costs in Chargen and accelerating costs with XP, it's very difficult to catch up. It still happens to me, and I've started just telling myself "it's just one or two dice, it's not the end of the world," which helps a little and is true, but there's often just that little annoyance still there.

One more thing that I really, really like about FS3 that helps with this is that sheets are visible by default, so you can always look at the sheets of those who are already doing the role that you're looking at, and see what level their skills are at. Of course, this doesn't help if you're one of the first to chargen, but if you join in later it's nice.

[faraday]

@kitteh I really truly don't mean to sound defensive of a system that obviously I myself disliked enough to change for 3rd edition But at the same time, I think it's worth noting that the difference between 9 and 12 in 2nd Ed is pretty small. By that point you're already rolling so many darn dice that the difference between the two just doesn't matter.

Now one can make the converse argument... yo, Fara, why even bother having the scale go to 12 if it doesn't make much of a difference past 9? I dunno Bragging rights? Symmetry? The off chance that you'll have a level 12 bad guy sometime and those extra few dice will matter? :helpless shrug:

[The Sands]

@faraday XP progression is nearly always problematic and may, in fact, be one of the most substantial problems game designers face. In short you are trying to balance the opposing forces of 'feeling of accomplishment' on the part of the dinos with 'feeling of contribution' on the part of the new players. If you make it so that it is easy for new players to catch up to the older players you seriously undercut the old player's feelings of achievement while if you make it too difficult for new players to catch up to the old players you end up with the new players feeling as though they are just cannon fodder. Balancing this is made trickier because not everyone agrees where the proper balance between the two is.

This is one of the reasons why I like a geometric progression chart with a more or less linear comparison. Just as a quick and dirty example I'll go back to my earlier example where a task is resolved by rolling 3d6 with a target of 11 or less, modified up or down by 1 point per different in level between competitors. If each level of the skill takes twice as long as the previous level then it would only take about 3 months for a brand new character to get to within 2 levels of a 1 year old character. With 3d6 you're still at a significant disadvantage but you are at least not ridiculously outclassed and personally I feel like if you have trouble that someone who has spent a solid year working on something has that much of an advantage over someone who has only spent 3 months you're probably skewing a little bit more to hurrying people up than I like.

This is just a super quick-and-dirty example as well. I suspect that after some work and balancing I would probably use 4d6 with a target of 14 which would make 2 levels of difference a little less significant. I might also use a scale of each level taking 2.5 or 3 times as long (to be completely honest I might be tempted to do something even more complex mathematically which would allow for fractional points, but as a quick example this works pretty well). Also the fact that characters wouldn't start from 0 means the difference in the brand new character and the one year veteran would be far closer.

[kitteh]

@Faraday Sure, maybe? I don't know the dice mechanics internally. Maybe it's perception. But also for things that aren't combat skills (like say, my standard L&L trope of taking fairly high Politics/Intrigue/whatever skill they make for that), it's fairly often opposed rolls with other PCs so the differences might be a bit more pronounced (as they seemed to be in your chart for the current system).

Annnnnnnd if you go back to my reasoning, you'll notice its not even necessarily 9 vs 12, but often something like 7 vs 12, just because its hard to grasp how much you should really take and people who are inherently NOT trying to min-max will often hedge toward caution, and then get steamrolled. Basically I dislike the huge range because it means a lot more guesswork at figuring out what number = 'really good but not twinky good'. That's really what it boils down to. The big scale makes that number hard to gauge, whereas in a standard WoD-esque system the answer is almost always 4

[faraday]

@The-Sands said in FS3:

XP progression is nearly always problematic and may, in fact, be one of the most substantial problems game designers face. In short you are trying to balance the opposing forces of 'feeling of accomplishment' on the part of the dinos with 'feeling of contribution' on the part of the new players.

You're totally right in general, but I made that decision long ago with FS3. The default setup (and what I use on my games) favors new people over dinos. Full stop. If people leave the game because they can't advance with XP, I'm okay with that. But as I said, the XP costs in FS3 are configurable so other games can do whatever they like.

@kitteh said in FS3:

The big scale makes that number hard to gauge, whereas in a standard WoD-esque system the answer is almost always 4

Fair enough In 3rd Ed I consider that number 6, for what it's worth.

[Thenomain]

@kitteh said in FS3:

@Thenomain Sure, but on a lot of FS3 games it happens on day 1

We just had Faraday saying how hard it is to happen ("over a year"), so how is it happening on Day 1?

[faraday]

@Thenomain Because you can start that high.

Argh enter. Like starting with a 5 in WoD. Although I dunno, maybe that's not a thing WoD MU*s do?

[kitteh]

@faraday

It's a thing in both system, starting maxed, but it matters more when it's the only measure of advancement (WoD usually has tons of parallel things, like you have your stats and skills, but also various powers and merits that you're advancing simultaneously).

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in FS3:

Like starting with a 5 in WoD. Although I dunno, maybe that's not a thing WoD MU*s do?

When everyone's a snowflake, it really doesn't matter how special you are.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in FS3:

@Thenomain Because you can start that high.

Argh enter. Like starting with a 5 in WoD. Although I dunno, maybe that's not a thing WoD MU*s do?

You can.

So you're saying that 6 to 12 is relatively equal in overall performance. I believe that people are so used to min-maxing while trusting the rule-set that sure, Person A will take something at 12, and sure Person B will look at Person A as the epitome of that ability.

If there is no outgoing reason to take a skill above 6, then the system is kind of lying to them. Not lying, but not helping people play it well? Like, I don't know, saying that the queen in Chess can move 'up to 7 spaces in any direction'. It's not a lie, but it's not the best way of describing the piece's ability.

Yes, this is me exploring the dissonance between what people expect (they may not be right!) and what game rules actually do (it may not be right!). This is really about trying to find @kitteh's underlying issue, as it seems to be based on perception. You two are saying different things about the same game system, that's for sure.