FS3 3rd Edition Feedback

[Misadventure]

Hopefully this is not beating a dead horse @faraday. I have found over the years that certain presentations, a way of talking about something, can be viscerally more acceptable to me when I am making my judgement. After a decade of Hero System Champions I realized that my own bias had made me miss a plain old math disparity.

That's what this is about in the end. Consistency of treatment. The newer FS sounds less like an issue. I wish you could address the older version of FS in the way discussed.

TLDR: Just because I like your concept less than another doesn't mean I should approve it with less overall power/value/xp.

[Warma Sheen]

@faraday said:

What I care about is whether your skills reflect your background.

Why does this matter? If you can have any skills you want and you just have to oversell your character's background, what's really the point? Fresh out of flight school? Okay, top of his class, experienced in multiple training and missions. Now that's fine on the game? I never understood that. If I can write any background I want, what does it matter what background I write?

And I'm sure there's a reason, I'm legitimately curious as to what it is.

[Misadventure]

It's how some people couch "I will vet this application to fit the game and my ideas of what is reasonable."

[faraday]

@Warma-Sheen said:

If you can have any skills you want and you just have to oversell your character's background, what's really the point? Fresh out of flight school? Okay, top of his class, experienced in multiple training and missions. Now that's fine on the game? I never understood that. If I can write any background I want, what does it matter what background I write?

It doesn't matter what you write, as long as you write something reasonable.

Frankly I don't look at the numbers, I look at the words: Novice-Proficient-Veteran-Master. Which fits your character? Fresh from flight school would normally be a high novice / low proficient. But if they were bullseyeing womprats in Beggar's Canyon in Grandpa's T-16 since they were 12... that would justify a higher rating.

Viper pilot with demolitions? WTF? Oh, Viper pilot who got his start in a mining crew before joining the war effort. Or Viper pilot who used to be a Sagittaron "freedom fighter". Sure, I'm down with that.

Of course it's all subjective, but I try to be as fair and consistent as humanly possible.

[bored]

@Warma-Sheen

It's bullshit, of course.

I have a real issue with the people who talk about systems like this and habitually put the onus on the players, calling them twinks and worse if they make the slightest observation about good mechanical choices and bad mechanical choices, rather than acknowledging that an exploitable system should be fixed. The average player who tweaks their sheet to be efficient per the game rules is not a 'twink'. They're just someone who knows the game and isn't interested in playing The Price is Right with their stats, guessing at how high they can go without going over some staffer's totally arbitrary high mark and getting screamed at and branded The Worst Kind of PlayerEvar.

Saying its 'what your BG supports' tends to be polite language to cover up staffers being able to be arbitrary, nepotistic lunatics. I'm not saying @faraday is this, but considering how I've been yelled at for totally sane sheets and OKed with borderline abusive ones on the same games sometimes (and by people who are considered sane, credible posters on this board) I have basically 0 faith in any staffer's 'good judgement' as a benchmark of anything except whether they're in a good mood that day.

[Alzie]

@bored said:

rather than acknowledging that an exploitable system should be fixed.

I await the day you find a system that involves numbers that can't be exploited. Even gambling can be exploited. I've got plenty of years to wait.

[faraday]

@Alzie said:

I await the day you find a system that involves numbers that can't be exploited. Even gambling can be exploited. I've got plenty of years to wait.

If I could upvote this 100 times I would

But seriously - you can make up a ridiculous character in any system. You can also get yelled at by crazy staffers for any number of crazy reasons. Blaming the skill system seems like blaming the hammer when someone picks it up and whacks you with it. It's a tool. Using it wisely is up to the person holding it.

[bored]

Right, and an issue not being 100% fixable is a reason to discount any attempt to fix it.

[faraday]

@bored said:

Right, and an issue not being 100% fixable is a reason to discount any attempt to fix it.

Certainly not. We just disagree on what, precisely, the issue is. The thing you want to "fix" is working just fine from my POV. That is not to say it's a perfect system for everyone. You're totally entitled to hate it, just as I hate D20. Pick any system - WoD, FUDGE, FATE, Cortex, D20, Millenium's End, Castle Falkenstein, Shadowrun, Mechwarrior, 7th Sea, Aces & Eights... those are just some of the ones on my shelf. I've studied all of them. None of them is perfect. They each make tradeoffs based on their core values. Find the system that's best for you. But I doubt you'll find one that can't be "exploited" in the manner you describe. If you do, I'd sincerely love to hear about it.

[Alzie]

@bored said:

Right, and an issue not being 100% fixable is a reason to discount any attempt to fix it.

Well...yes. If you can't fix it, why are you trying? It's like the people who keep trying to prove that 2+2 isn't 4. Why are they trying at this point?

[bored]

@faraday
I don't think you're really engaging this honestly (and thought you'd stopped caring).

You say it's not broken from your POV, even after you asked me for specifics and I showed you, what, nearly 100xp worth of gap between characters cged in different ways. What would be a problem, by your standards?

The rest of your text above, I don't know what it even means. 'Core values?' The core value of FS3 is linear cg, exponential xp? Really? It feels like you're just doubling down harder and harder on this being something worth defending, despite giving no reason it's actually valuable or defensible beside your vague 'philosophy.' I think we can toss realism out, because your preferred version is hardly any more realistic, nor is the system on the whole.

@Alzie

Except... it is largely fixable here. The fix has been discussed. The fix is obvious and will work. For reasons of 'philosophy' (?) and 'realism' (lol) it will not be implemented!

[faraday]

@bored said:

I don't think you're really engaging this honestly (and thought you'd stopped caring).

You're right, I stupidly allowed myself to get drawn back into the debate. My bad. At any rate, I've been 100% honest. Whether you choose to accept my reasons/philosophy is your choice.

[Seraphim73]

I'd say that what we have here is a problem that game designers find in any medium: what happens when the dirty, no good players get their hands on a game. It's the reason that any good game company has external playtests as well as internal playtests.

See, the game designer -knows- how the game is supposed to be played, and designs the game toward that end. And Faraday has done a very good job in designing a game that is balanced for what it was designed to do: start from a non-min-maxed perspective and have it be increasingly more difficult to raise skills.

The problem comes when the people running the game using that system do not ensure point 1: starting from a non-min-maxed perspective. In a commercially-available game, you would put further restraints on chargen (or use XP to do chargen as @bored (I believe) suggested). For a free-to-use game, however, Faraday can simply tell game owners/chargen staffers to watch out for min-maxed characters, and leave it at that... so long as they do so (or don't care about the results), it's all good.

[Apos]

One alternate suggestion would be automatically calculate what the character would have cost in experience points to generate their starting character for them, start them at negative or positive afterwards as a result of the pool. Starts players on an identical post CG advancement, doesn't effect the new player experience in CG by overloading them with confusing numbers. I'd be less concerned by twinks and more concerned with completely new players getting through CG, playing a month, then feeling 'cheated' later when they realize they could have designed their sheet a different way to save XP. In making a newbie friendly system I think that case is significantly more worrisome than random assholes (see @bored ).

[faraday]

@Apos said:

One alternate suggestion would be automatically calculate what the character would have cost in experience points to generate their starting character for them, start them at negative or positive afterwards as a result of the pool.

Yes, @Misadventure said something similar earlier in the thread and I agree that's a reasonable compromise.

Also bear in mind that if you really feel strongly that chargen and XP should have the same kind of progression, you can always make XP linear. It's just a matter of tweaking the numbers in a configuration table. I favor that far more than changing chargen.

[Thenomain]

I know that I am a hundred posts away from this point now, but by god I'm going to make it.

---

@faraday said:

@Thenomain - Sorry if I'm being dense, but I'm not sure quite what "rules" you're looking for. Dice mechanics? Chargen instructions? As you say, FS3 is a framework not a complete game, so I'm not sure that what you're looking for actually exists.

That's what I was exploring at first and am now outright saying. If FS3 is a framework, then I am poking holes in @bored's complaints that it can be gamed. You can't game a framework. You need a system before it can be gamed. At worst you can complain about people's use of the toolkit, but I can't see any sincere argument to be made about how people might implement it (edit: unless the framework is so broken that it's difficult to implement it in a way that works; not the case here). Certainly not in the way that @bored has made it. That is one dead horse.

Maybe system toolkits need building instructions somewhere between Ikea (Fate Core) and kitbashing (Fudge), and that would be my first complaint about FS3. You know, how do I turn this collection of ideas into a system? I don't see this being your focus, tho, so I'm mainly throwing this out there to throw out there.

---

But it occurs to me, right this instant, is that I could be thinking about it wrong, and we could be talking about it wrong. FS3 is not a toolkit to a system, it's a system of guidelines. A system of guidelines is all a lot of RP-centric games need. They don't need a convoluted mash-up of six more or less similarly based game systems (WoD).

I'm going to have to think a bit more about what I mean by "a system of guidelines". I do wish that this system had more of them to make it easier to apply. How many skills is comfortable to balance things out? I could be over-thinking it. It happens.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@Apos said:

I'd be less concerned by twinks and more concerned with completely new players getting through CG, playing a month, then feeling 'cheated' later when they realize they could have designed their sheet a different way to save XP. In making a newbie friendly system I think that case is significantly more worrisome than random assholes (see @bored ).

You could also just let players re-spec after a month. I have asked to do this on an FS3 game before and it was no more complicated than resetting my sheet and going back through chargen (well maybe there were back-end complications, idk, but nobody freaked out about the idea).

[faraday]

@Thenomain I think what you're looking for is something akin to the FS3 Storyteller's Guide. That's 1st edition documentation because, frankly, what I found was that nobody read it and so I never bothered to update it after 1st edition And it's not the greatest writing either. But I will concede that implementing the framework could be better if you know what it's good at / not so good at.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

Well for example, I hear about how awesome the combat system on these Battlestar games are. I look at the chargen document and I look for the awesomeness in it. I don't think this excitement is a fluke, but I don't see any leading examples as to why it wasn't a fluke.

I've been getting lost recently as people talk about FS3 as both a role-playing game system and a coded system, when it's not fully either of these things. I'm only now realizing that the original purpose of this thread is: Hey, people who've played on games with this, what do you think of these changes? I'm clearly not the target audience, but as not-the-target-audience I'm exploring.

Also, sometimes I code small, easy systems for fun. Go figure.

[faraday]

@Thenomain

Well for example, I hear about how awesome the combat system on these Battlestar games are. I look at the chargen document and I look for the awesomeness in it. I don't think this excitement is a fluke, but I don't see any leading examples as to why it wasn't a fluke.

Frankly I don't think that it's the RPG system that makes it awesome. It's just the fact that the code enables you to do these massive combats with some modest amount of flexibility. Actually, +combat started out implemented with FUDGE on Battlestar Pacifica. I switched it over to FS3 later.

The combat section of the old player's guide might be of interest there. Most of the mechanics have stayed the same throughout the editions.

I have gotten lots of positive feedback about how fast/easy chargen and chargen review is. That, honestly, is the primary motivation for FS3. The combat was just because I happen to use FS3 on combat-heavy Battlestar games and needed a way to not go more insane.

I've been getting lost recently as people talk about FS3 as both a role-playing game system and a coded system, when it's not fully either of these things.

LOL, yes. FS3 itself is a RPG framework, as you said. There's some code that provides one implementation of FS3, which has easy hooks for numerous customizations.

And just to add more confusion to the mix - folks have started talking about my entire softcode package as "the FS3 codebase", even though they're really only tangentially related.

At any rate, a fresh set of eyes is more than welcome.