FS3 3rd Edition Feedback
-
@faraday said:
@Thenomain said:
A lot of games are very specific about what happens if you try to do Skill-Thing without having Skill.
FS3 is too. Or I try to make it so - I would be happy to have feedback about the quality of the docs. You can default as long as there's a "reasonable chance" of success. Again see the footrace / brain surgery example.
I thought it did so, considering the Fudge/Fate Skill Pyramid going on there, but the way you were talking about it if 'drive' were on that list you couldn't drive if you didn't take points in the skill.
But a car to the average first-worlder is not an alien device. Zero points in 'drive' in this world doesn't mean 'can't drive'. (I am also starting to understand what would be required for game design with this system.)
As far as assuming average... Basically: If it's an Action Skill, it's likely to come up in the course of the game so you're expected to take it at the appropriate level based on your char's experience. Background Skills (now split into Interests and Expertise in 3rd edition) cover everything else and they're more "take what's important to your char". You're not expected to take Baseball just because you played catch in the backyard as a kid.
And this is design-document material.
Also, they're probing questions. I don't think any of them are meant to incite or harsh. You're taking it well, but it could look like a dog-pile.
Well it's hard not to take it harshly when words like "bad design", "terrible idea" and "broken system" are thrown around, but I did ask for feedback so I can't really complain too much.
Yeah, but I don't think even that person was meaning to be a jerk about it. Unless they were. In which case fuck 'em.
I still don't understand this complaint when 3rd ed forces you to take fluffy background skills and gives you up to four for free.
The way I'm reading it is "this skill is bullshit therefore I'm wasting points" in that, yes, cultural online-WoD way of things.
Games are also free to configure position-based skill packages.
This freedom is part of my issue, not because people are spoiled for choice but the "framework" etc. etc. I mentioned earlier, was acknowledged, and it's a horse that doesn't need any more beating.
For instance, all my military characters are required to buy First Aid/Firearms/Melee 1 just because of basic training.
And people don't remember on places like Haunted Memories (WoD) where people in the police force also had to have certain skill packages. It's not a new concept for anywhere.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@faraday said:
If you dump all your points in basketweaving you're not going to be as combat-effective as someone who dumped them into firearms.
I put my trust in the internet and as usual it didn't disappoint me.
-
@Alzie said:
@Faraday I mean, I don't really care about FS3 one way or another, but you built an RPG system and your premise was to make it inherently imbalanced?
It's like you've never played on any World of Darkness games, ever. Don't be an idiot.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said:
I thought it did so, considering the Fudge/Fate Skill Pyramid going on there, but the way you were talking about it if 'drive' were on that list you couldn't drive if you didn't take points in the skill.
No, sorry, I think I wasn't clear there. You can make a defaulting roll for Driving even if you don't have it. That's a storyteller's situational call.
What I meant was... my personal philosophy is that if something appears on the Action Skill list, then I expect your rating in it to match your background. This is how I perform app reviews and how I do my level best to discourage people from "gaming" the system. Incidentally, this is also how I approach chargen for my own characters.
So if I were to put Drive on my Action Skill list for some silly reason, and you don't take a point in it, I'm gonna ask you during chargen review... "So... you don't have any points in driving. Was it really your intent to not know how to drive?"
For this reason, I would never put Drive on the Action Skill list. It's silly. Driving is common knowledge and not likely to come up in conflict situations. If you want to be a stock car racer, you can take it as an Expertise.
-
Couple of things. Firstly: Systems don't care about your personal preference. Sorry! You code, so you know that the goal of code is to implement system designs. So when you say "I think this system should be used thus" as the designer of the system, I wonder, then why not simply say to the people who want to use the system, "do it thusly". A lot of problems get solved this way.
Secondly, I like your examples of Action vs. Expertise skills. All of them have been useful to me to understand the underlying design and intent. edit: Tho I think the name 'action' for those skills is throwing me a bit. I'll have to think about it.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said:
@Alzie said:
@Faraday I mean, I don't really care about FS3 one way or another, but you built an RPG system and your premise was to make it inherently imbalanced?
It's like you've never played on any World of Darkness games, ever. Don't be an idiot.
World of Darkness is not inherently imbalanced as a premise. So i'm not sure what you're getting at.
-
@Alzie said:
@Thenomain said:
@Alzie said:
@Faraday I mean, I don't really care about FS3 one way or another, but you built an RPG system and your premise was to make it inherently imbalanced?
It's like you've never played on any World of Darkness games, ever. Don't be an idiot.
World of Darkness is not inherently imbalanced as a premise. So i'm not sure what you're getting at.
I don't think FS3 is inherently imbalanced as a premise, so I'm not sure what you're getting at either. But WoD is imbalanced, and you volunteered to play with this kind of system. You coded for it, and on more than one occasion I pointed out the flaws in your coded systems and you told me that what's done is done. You are in no position to throw around these insults.
Man up and have a discussion about it if you want, but damn, boy.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
From someone who has played and staffed on games running FS3, because I think some points might be helpful clarified: actions skills are set by the staff. They decide what selection of skills are going to be baked-in, and like Faraday has said, they should be skills that are going to be important to the game. This will be different based on your theme, because what's important in one game isn't important on another. We don't have anything related to driving in our Action Skills list on X-Factor, which is about mutants, but we do have Transportation on our list for Transformers: Lost & Found, which is meant to account for particular skill in driving/flying/boating whatever for robots in their alt-modes. I would totally do Driving as an action skill if I were running, say, a Mad Max game.
I took Driving as a Background Skill for a character on X-Factor because he has like advanced training in driving and SOMEDAY I'll totally get to roll it for something and it'll be fun. In the new system as Faraday's described it, this would probably end up as an Expertise skill. Right now, players can set pretty much anything they want for a Background Skill from a code point of view. It's a freeform thing where you're just like "I want to put points in Video Games!" It's probably not going to come up in GMed plot scenes, but you might have fun rolling it in a regular scene with another player.
You could totally have a situation where a staff made poor choices about what to put on the Action Skills list when they were building the game; however, the documentation for installing everything is pretty clear on what kinds of skills are best to mark as Action Skills, and how many total skills is a good number to have on that list.
On X-Factor -- and on the now-defunct Steel & Stone, which is where I first encountered FS3 -- we actually give more chargen points to start for characters who are older on the logic that they have had more time to develop skills. This isn't baked-in to the system, though.
-
@Thenomain said:
But WoD is imbalanced, and you volunteered to play with this kind of system.
We all know that the writers for splats were different. We also know they wrote most of them intentionally looking to make the other splats look weaker. The ultimate result of this, much like it was in oWoD, was the book in which a splat gained the ability to modify core game rules at a whim.
However, those are addons. World of Darkness, as a system, refers to what's in the core rulebook. Those mechanics are sane. They aren't designed to be imbalanced on principle. The fact that someone then took those base mechanics and decided to imbalance them for literary amusement doesn't mean that the intention from the start was to make a system that is imbalanced on premise.
@Thenomain said:
You coded for it, and on more than one occasion I pointed out the flaws in your coded systems and you told me that what's done is done. You are in no position to throw around these insults.
Apples and oranges. You pointed out things like 'I really wish your roster system was real time' (Which it was at the end btw) or 'I really wish your hangouts addon was listed in this order instead of this order' (Which is a preference). Those aren't really flaws. We discussed preferences and argued over whether or not get, %v or xget was the correct way to code.
@thenomain said:
Man up and have a discussion about it if you want, but damn, boy.
Okay, I'm here juice daddy. Hit me up for that discussion.
-
@faraday said:
None of these ways is "right" or "wrong" in the absolute sense of the word, but #3 is what I would call closest to the "spirit" of FS3. There's very little thought involved in chargen. You just go through the very short action skill list and pick the descriptive name that best fits your character in each one. Then you pick a couple interests to round
The 'spirit' of FS3 is still that the guy who apps, say (using your fondness for military stuff), a hunter turned weapons specialist, with max for CG firearms will be a fundamentally better character than the guy who apps, I don't know, a military college trained commissioned officer turned desk jockey with a broad range of academic and social skills on top of military stuff from basic.
The redneck hunter, after a couple months, will be just as good at all the random stuff the above character has, while the other guy will never be as good of a shot. BOTH people are approaching CG from your #3 option 'organic CG' approach, yet one is punished by your system.
Hence, that part of your system is bad. No amount of your vaguely smug elitist RPer justification will change that.
-
That example was already made, without the antagonism.
-
I made it before, in fact! But you know, she keeps saying she'll stop, and she doesn't.
Besides, the whole 'there are these 3 kinds of players, and while its cool if you want to be one of these other two, I prefer the one I am not-so-obliquely suggesting is more RP-focused and less powergamey' shtick really gets to me. It's a nasty, negative attitude (shaming anyone who does the slightest bit of math in a game full of numbers) wrapped up in nice words. I think it deserves to be called out as smug and nasty.
-
@Alzie said:
@Thenomain said:
@Alzie said:
@Faraday I mean, I don't really care about FS3 one way or another, but you built an RPG system and your premise was to make it inherently imbalanced?
It's like you've never played on any World of Darkness games, ever. Don't be an idiot.
World of Darkness is not inherently imbalanced as a premise. So i'm not sure what you're getting at.
Um mage vs vampire any edition ever published. ... NWoD 2.0 might change that but I seriously doubt it.
-
@Thenomain said:
Couple of things. Firstly: Systems don't care about your personal preference.
Oh, absolutely. But as you said earlier, FS3 is a toolkit. As the system designer, I can say (and have said) "Here's how it's intended to be used", "Here's how I think it works best" and "Here's an example of how I use it." How you choose to use it is your job as a game admin. I have no control over that. But I could do a better job of writing up my guidance. As I mentioned, I had all that written up for 1st ed and it was largely ignored so I let it lapse. I'm not opposed to resurrecting it.
-
FS3 has always struck me as a system where you might be able to round out your character a little with XP, you were never really meant to become an expert at something through experience alone. You app in with a character who is an expert, or you don't. Your inept teenage kid isn't 6 months from now going to be a master at everything, as has become somewhat of a norm in all the WoD games floating around. I liked that. It gives the games a different feel. Sure, its way more point-effective to min-max the system, but that's the case for any system with exponential costs.
-
I want it to be a system, tho.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain Why, though? I mean even if I made a full "Faraday's Battlestar RPG" (for example) with everything spelled out as a cohesive rulebook, would that really be any more useful than the FS3 codebase that comes pre-configured with a stock BSG setup and a set of help files?
-
@bored said:
I made it before, in fact! But you know, she keeps saying she'll stop, and she doesn't.
Besides, the whole 'there are these 3 kinds of players, and while its cool if you want to be one of these other two, I prefer the one I am not-so-obliquely suggesting is more RP-focused and less powergamey' shtick really gets to me. It's a nasty, negative attitude (shaming anyone who does the slightest bit of math in a game full of numbers) wrapped up in nice words. I think it deserves to be called out as smug and nasty.
Perhaps you missed the part where I specifically said "And, btw, I'm not saying the people who do #1 or #2 are "ZOMG evil min-maxers" or anything. It's just a different approach, totally valid on some games. But that's not what I want on mine." I don't want automated bots or character classes/levels on my game either. That doesn't mean I look down on people who play MMOs. In fact, I quite enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies and WoW. It's just a different style of play.
And I'm sorry, I didn't realize that saying I was done arguing about it with YOU meant that I couldn't respond to anyone else on my own thread. I'll bear that in mind next time. Or not. Or maybe I'll just change my mind. Unless of course that's not allowed either.
-
It was partially self-mocking, my reply. But in this discussion I think what I really want is a more solid foundation, like d20 SRD. That you don't want to is fine, but your design philosophy should still be important to anyone who designs based on it. This system is for... (fill in the rest!)
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said:
d20 SRD
I'm not really familiar with that. Haven't played D20 since D20 Star Wars first came out. Glancing at it online though it would appear to be just the generic DnD style fantasy D20 rules?
And it's not so much that I don't want to, it's just that I'm afraid of doing it and having it collect dust on a website
