FS3

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@faraday said in FS3:

I get that some people aren't happy with an Expert succeeding at a routine task 98% of the time - they'd want it to be 100%. What I don't get is people acting like it's some kind of failure-ridden abomination when the math says otherwise. FS3 has the same basic roll mechanic as many of the leading RPG systems.

This is not a problem on the games you GM or the FS3 games I play on for any length of time, which are run by sane people who don't make you roll for stupid, mundane things you'd obviously succeed at.

Unfortunately, the ease-of-use of the system makes it appealing to everyone, and everyone is...not sane. I have VIVID memories of my brief time on Battlestar Pegasus. Which was a dumpster fire in any number of ways (oh, games made with dbs stolen from other games, are you ever a good idea?). But one of the particularly stupid aspects of it was that there were...god, something like 20 action skills? For non-combat roles and everyday military job-like things. It was set up to make you roll for EVERYTHING. It was some dumb shit.

Obviously I left Pegasus quickly for a whole host of reasons, and you can't fix bad people. But some guidance for how GMs should approach the system might be helpful just so they didn't...do that.

[faraday]

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in FS3:

Obviously I left Pegasus quickly for a whole host of reasons, and you can't fix bad people. But some guidance for how GMs should approach the system might be helpful just so they didn't...do that.

Yeah the advice to keep the number of action skills low and not roll for everything has always been there, but maybe it wasn't obvious enough. I tried to make it better for 3rd ed with some more extensive documentation, including guides on choosing and tweaking FS3.

But like you said, I don't think any system can protect you from insane GMs.

[golgoth]

@faraday Just as a slightly random interjection (or whatever), male peak physical fitness is around 30-35 before it begins to decline. 45, 50? You're working out every day for multiple hours a day in order to maintain, but gains in physical fitness would be much slower than that 30 year old.

Mental capability is a whole other thing. There are two types of mental capabilities: Fluid and Crystallized. One deteriorates at around 26, the other at about 70. Crystallized is basically steady through out our lives.

All in all, mental capabilities follow along the same path of physical ability in that it starts to decline around 30-40s (one of the reasons I could never grasp why intellect would continue to go up while physical traits go down). ... Mostly because your brain is a muscle just like your biceps.

Anyhow, papers are published on that topic, this is totally off the main topic, sorry.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in FS3:

This is not a problem on the games you GM or the FS3 games I play on for any length of time, which are run by sane people who don't make you roll for stupid, mundane things you'd obviously succeed at.

This is more a a failing of the nature of RPGs than of any particular system. No game system can compensate for a sub standard GM or in the case of MU* staff. I have been in games with wonderful systems that have been horrible both on-line and in person because of this.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@ThatGuyThere
Oh, yeah, I agree completely. A lot of the complaints I hear about FS3, I instantly think, 'Well, the GM was clearly doing xyz WRONG in that scenario...' But you can say the same thing about FATE (a fun game I've been involved in terrible campaigns of because of the runner), d20, or anything. I don't know how prominently to put the 'don't be stupid' language, because with some people it'll just never be enough. As was discussed earlier in this thread, I find the general way the combat system spits out results cool and feel like it gives me and the runner freedom to decide what happens that I like. Other players who want more structure/direction find a simple EVADES confusing. It's a balancing act.

And, again, you 100% cannot fix stupid with rules.

[Seraphim73]

@WTFE said in FS3:

I don't mind failed rolls or even failed scenes if the opposition warrants it. Hell, failure leads to more future fun typically! But when you come across as the rainbow butt monkey of the group--and when this happens enough times that it becomes a bad running gag like a late-'90s SNL sketch--when all the numbers say you're a competent professional it's really damned off-putting.

Completely agree on this, actually. It's one of the most frustrating experiences for me (and it appears you, and I would bet others as well) when a character specifically built for something fails at it repeatedly on-screen. Often, however, it's just the RNG being an asshole, and it just feels like it's happening all the time. It doesn't make it feel any better, of course.

@faraday said in FS3:

What I don't get is people acting like it's some kind of failure-ridden abomination when the math says otherwise.

I really, really don't think anyone is saying that (maybe @WTFE is, but I don't think that even he is). There has been some criticism in this thread and others--most of which is difference of vision (someone sees something as a problem while you see it as working as intended) or simply bad experiences with dice--but there's a ton of stuff right with FS3--and even more with 3rd Edition.

@faraday said in FS3:

Yeah the advice to keep the number of action skills low and not roll for everything has always been there, but maybe it wasn't obvious enough. I tried to make it better for 3rd ed with some more extensive documentation, including guides on choosing and tweaking FS3.

Yeah, nothing is going to fix bad Staffers. Nothing. Ever. I mean, I get that some people are like "I have the skill, I want to roll it," but really... some things should just be auto-successes at a given level (do you remember to order food and drink for the party with your Administration 6?).

[faraday]

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

I really, really don't think anyone is saying that (maybe @WTFE is, but I don't think that even he is).

It wasn't specifically about this thread, but "I'm supposed to be awesome and I suck all the time" is the #1 criticism I have heard about the system over the years. Frankly it just baffles me a bit because yeah, dice are random. That's kinda the point of dice. (The #2 criticism is the CG/XP/min-max balance issue, which I at least understand even though I disagree with.)

[Seraphim73]

@faraday said in FS3:

It wasn't specifically about this thread, but "I'm supposed to be awesome and I suck all the time" is the #1 criticism I have heard about the system over the years.

This comes up because people remember the times when their characters sucked due to RNG and it made them angry far, far, far longer than they remember the times when their characters were awesome as expected. Just how a lot of humans are wired. I still remember some epic failures from... more than a decade ago. Maybe even decadeS.

[faraday]

@Seraphim73 Yeah, and when you only roll once in a blue moon, the effects are amplified. Nobody playing tabletop bats an eye when their awesome archer misses a shot. It's expected. But do the same on a MU* and ZOMG it's the end of the world. I've often wondered if a radically different system would fit MU*s better - something like Amber's diceless system or a point-based system where you get to choose how to spend your luck or whatnot.

Random side note: the "I suck so the system sucks" griping was even worse in first edition because nobody understood the way the roll resolution worked. It wasn't until I changed the system over to a familiar die mechanic and then changed the system to show the actual die rolls that people finally started to trust that the system wasn't just broken. But as some of the comments in this thread show, there are still a lot of folks who are not thrilled about it.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in FS3:

Yeah, and when you only roll once in a blue moon, the effects are amplified. Nobody playing tabletop bats an eye when their awesome archer misses a shot. It's expected. But do the same on a MU* and ZOMG it's the end of the world. I've often wondered if a radically different system would fit MU*s better - something like Amber's diceless system or a point-based system where you get to choose how to spend your luck or whatnot.

One of the things I learned from FS3 is that you can have a robust combat system with simplistic rolling. I'm on my fourth edition of my system, and I intend to pare down the system even more than what you've done, and I still think I can make it work.

[faraday]

I'm moving the discussion from BSGU over to here because talking about FS3 in two different threads is a little weird.

@kitteh said in BSG: Unification:

Certainly, it was explicitly pointed out that this is the assumption of FS3; one round isn't a half second of quick reflex action, it's some vague (but considerably longer) stretch of dogfighting that is at least enough for some significant maneuvering and exchange of fire at probably multiple points throughout. So it's not 'how much do people really miss' but rather 'how often do professionals fail to carry out their job at all.'

Close. As evidenced by the ammo tracking (which takes off one round per combat action), a FS3 turn represents one attack. Now it's assumed that you’re not sitting still pumping round after round after round downrange. There's going to be a pause in-between shots for maneuvering, tracking your target, etc. So it really is one attack = one shot = one miss.

(Before anyone says it - I know, I know, that’s not a perfect reflection of real combat. It’s just a game.)

Anyway, there seems a lot of hate here for 'people complaining about missing' (ie, probably at me) but also a lot of it seems completely stripped of the context of the original thread. It wasn't really about 'omg we miss so much wah wah,' it was about whether or not there was ample opportunity for lower-skilled PCs to actually have fun in combat…

I don’t know who specifically you were replying to there but just to clarify ... when I brought up complaints about missing, I certainly wasn’t intending to hate on anybody or single anybody out. As @ThreeEyedCrow said, it’s a recurring theme that’s been brought up time and again on FS3 games for ten years.

And in large part I agree with it. It’s not fun to miss all the time. It’s not fun when you build a character around a concept of being good at X, and then the one time you have to use X in a scene, you fail (even if you would’ve succeeded at that roll 95% of the time overall). It's boring when combat rounds are just everyone whiffing at each other (in fact, I've been known to immediately trigger another turn when that happens).

I just don’t know how to fix that with dice. Dice will always be random - that's what they're for. If you look at the combats on BSGU, one could argue I’ve tuned it too much in the direction of being a cakewalk. There have been like two PC KOs in 7 months of constant combat. We’ve got two people who are nearly triple-aces. And yet I still get people (not just you!) who aren’t having fun because they feel like they miss too much.

Maybe I take the criticism too much to heart but I just want people to have fun. And, well, it’d be nice if they didn’t hate my system.

[faraday]

@The-Sands said in BSG: Unification:

That was really meant to be a statement to the people who were arguing that the system was unrealistic; you -don't- want it more realistic. It will (probably) not result in you hitting your targets more. It will most likely result in you liking the game even less because while you -think- you are looking for realism what you are really looking for is the simulacrum of realism (in this case using the term in its artistic sense for an object which is actually distorted but which is distorted in such a way that it becomes more acceptable to the viewer than a properly proportioned object).

Millenium's End was actually the most realistic RPG combat system I've seen. You missed an awful lot, but one shot had a good chance of taking you out. They had rules for bleeding and critical hits and all sorts of other realistic wound stuff. Hit location was a nifty silhouette system that varied the hitloc based on the position of your target. It was a work of art.

My tabletop buddies played it twice, declared: "This system is no fun at all." and never looked back I can't say they were wrong.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

How about using that hit system in Shadowrun? Would you work with me on that? Eh? Eh?

[The Sands]

@faraday said in FS3:

I just don’t know how to fix that with dice. Dice will always be random - that's what they're for. If you look at the combats on BSGU, one could argue I’ve tuned it too much in the direction of being a cakewalk. There have been like two PC KOs in 7 months of constant combat. We’ve got two people who are nearly triple-aces. And yet I still get people (not just you!) who aren’t having fun because they feel like they miss too much.

Personally, what I would look at is some sort of bell curve system. It's actually one of my favorite parts of the design in the Hero Games system. In that system whenever you try to succeed in a task (what I term 'challenge resolution' when talking about general game design) you roll 3d6 and just add the results up. In the case of combat results you want to roll 11 or less which is then modified by the difference in combat values. That sounds more complex than it actually is. If a person has an offensive combat value of 8 and they shoot at someone with a defensive combat value of 6 they need a 13 or less. If someone with an offensive combat value of 6 shoots at someone with a defensive combat value of 8 they need a 9 or less. This means they guy with the better skill will pretty reliably hit the guy with the lower skill (about 84% of the time) while the guy with the lower skill really needs to get a lucky shot (they only hit 37.5% of the time).

That's a direct one on one slugfest, however. You can get plenty of additional complications such as one person dodging (which means they cannot attack but they get an additional three points to their defensive combat value). HGS does do something that, I think, show's its age a little in that while combat is done through a single roll to hit where stats are compared other actions are handled as skill-vs-skill rolls in which you see who has a larger margin of success (as a quick example a person with stealth at 14 or less who rolls and gets an 11 will sneak past someone with a perception score of 12 or less who rolls a 10 since they succeeded by 3 points while the guard only succeeds by 2). Personally I would probably either do all opposed challenges as skill-vs-skill (so offensive skill vs. defensive skill) or else I would make all contested actions a single roll where the stats are compared (so the person with stealth needs a 13 or less to sneak past since their stealth of 14 is being compared to a perception of 12).

I know that systems with lots of dice and limited possibility of success per die are popular these days and I recognize that these give you something of a bell curve but the curves tend to come up rather lumpy and uneven.

[The Sands]

@faraday said in FS3:

Millenium's End was actually the most realistic RPG combat system I've seen. You missed an awful lot, but one shot had a good chance of taking you out. They had rules for bleeding and critical hits and all sorts of other realistic wound stuff. Hit location was a nifty silhouette system that varied the hitloc based on the position of your target. It was a work of art.

My tabletop buddies played it twice, declared: "This system is no fun at all." and never looked back I can't say they were wrong.

Someone mentioned CORPS earlier. The company that created CORPS had a system before that was never really named but which was used by games such Spacetime that pretty much broke me out of my own desire to find more and more realistic game systems and our situation was pretty much the same. We never really played it. Instead we spent time making up a couple of characters and ran a couple of mock combats before realizing that the system, while highly realistic, was very slow, resulted in combat that didn't feel very fun because the odds to hit someone substantially seemed pretty low, but then once a character was solidly hit they went down like a sack of potatoes and were out of action for weeks.

Incidentally the company's name is Blacksburg Tactical Research Center and they are one of those groups who got their hands on data from state and local agencies and who were really committed to trying to make combat work as realistically as possible.

[faraday]

@The-Sands said in FS3:

I know that systems with lots of dice and limited possibility of success per die are popular these days and I recognize that these give you something of a bell curve but the curves tend to come up rather lumpy and uneven.

That's not really my experience looking at the stats. Multiple-success systems do give you a pretty good distribution of results. And FS3 1st edition actually had a home-grown custom bell curve system that was very carefully constructed.

I don't think it's actually a math problem but an artifact (I won't even say "problem" necessarily) of perception. I mean, 2d6 is a pretty perfect bell curve, but that doesn't help you over the 10 or so rolls at the craps table. I think the same is true on a MUSH because of the limited sample size of your die rolls.

[The Sands]

@faraday Actually, 2d6 isn't really a bell curve. It's a pyramid shape. While the odds of 7 are higher than anything else because there are so few dice involved it is much more 'swingy' than 3d6 (Traveller, incidentally, used 2d6).

The thing with the 'many dice' systems is that they aren't real bell curves and they have some terribly awkward spots. As an example lets just assume you have a range between 1 and 8 dice. Someone with 3 dice has a massive advantage over someone with 1. On the other hand someone with 8 dice only has a minor advantage over someone with 6. Considering how in many systems (FS3 included, I believe) it takes a huge effort to get those extra 2 dice at the end that creates a sort of imbalance in the curve.

[Lotherio]

@Thenomain said in FS3:

@faraday

How about using that hit system in Shadowrun? Would you work with me on that? Eh? Eh?

There are hit locations, used in conjunction more with armor and vehicles. As I recall at least. Even if no armor it wasn't hard to have hit locations.

Another fun thing with older FS3. Vehicles where fun and easy to set up. It was easy to make differences enough fit class of ship; on the steampunk places the naval cannons could do some damage to the air ships. But, I've not seen others do this, a vehicle could be set up to be musketeers platoon with the pilot being unit lead. Hit locations were easy to customize to like front rank or left flank. All the penetration and lethality could be set up in detail ... Bayonets with high penetration for use against mounted or anything really.

It could have extensive lists of vehicles, armors and stances to reflect a detail of military variances very easily. Everyone says it's not good for fantasy, the only thing it doesn't do is merits and flaws for bonuses or magic, but it's a great system and it has applications beyond its full intent even.

[kitteh]

@faraday said in FS3:

I'm moving the discussion from BSGU over to here because talking about FS3 in two different threads is a little weird.

I really didn't mean to reopen any of this and I'm not sure why this whole post is @me. I wasn't criticizing your stuff at all, or even talking about missing or realism etc until people got very nasty about it. It feels like a couple people came in and started beating their own drums about 'lol the whiners' and 'you dummies don't know much about real guns'. AKA, standard condescending head-patting bullshit?

I don’t know who specifically you were replying to

I was talking to @Three-Eyed-Crow and @The-Sands, who were the referenced people in my post and seemed to be the ones drumming up this whole thing out of nothing. Not you in any way shape or form.

There have been like two PC KOs in 7 months of constant combat. We’ve got two people who are nearly triple-aces. And yet I still get people (not just you!) who aren’t having fun because they feel like they miss too much.

I mean again, I really am NOT on this point any more so you don't need to address it to me. A lot of my stuff was cleared up in this thread a while ago (ie, not really knowing what the scale of the NPC skill totals was, and even you coding some new stuff that's totally awesome). I know my PC is always going to suck in combat - I could probably give some constructive thoughts on the issues I just quoted but I feel like I'd just get attacked more for doing it (not by you).

Also re: the ammo thing, it's minor but I think there's a pretty big gap in that between the missiles and normal guns. People pretty much pose whatever with the autoguns (and justifiably, they spam those things like crazy in the TV show :P), while the missiles are an obvious single shot, one-roll, one-hit/miss, so it's not entirely the same thing.

[Thenomain]

Since there's been some confusion over it, I was replying to this:

@faraday said in FS3:

Millenium's End was actually the most realistic RPG combat system I've seen. You missed an awful lot, but one shot had a good chance of taking you out. They had rules for bleeding and critical hits and all sorts of other realistic wound stuff. Hit location was a nifty silhouette system that varied the hitloc based on the position of your target. It was a work of art.

I didn't think to quote it, because I was making the comment directly following the thing I was commenting about. Sheesh.