FS3

[Ganymede]

@kitteh said in FS3:

One, the one (action-y) thing she's supposed to be good at, well, she's actually just the same as everyone else (because everyone min-maxes). Two, the thing she's bad at, well, it makes her preeeetty bad and she's mostly always going to be that way. I think she can bump the skill once in a reasonable timeframe, but after that it will be (RL) years?

Most people on BSG:U should be good at what they do. Pilots are all going to be exceptional pilots; Marines are all going to be exceptional combatants. And the points allow you to do this, and this seems rather realistic to me.

Frankly, I like FS3. A lot. I think you need to funnel specialization the way @faraday has proposed, which is to limit the number of Attributes and Action Skills above "Good."

Edited to add: regarding Connor McDavid, amassing the most points does not make you the best player on a hockey team.

[kitteh]

@Ganymede Dunno why this is getting rehashed now!

I have no problem with everyone being good or how things are setup overall, though, regarding 'everyone being good at what they do', half the point is that if you don't start out good at what you do, you may never be. But we were mostly talking about the learning times, which she also clarified are shorter than appear in game, due to a bug or something.

[faraday]

@kitteh said in FS3:

People do communicate and pose tactics in combat but... there's too many people, too little time, etc, for you to skim through all of that and translate it into bonuses? I mean if you actively do this and we just don't see it, I stand pre-emptively corrected. That aside, the one thing I've rarely seen is a tactical briefing or even an in-flight but pre-combat 'huddle' where there's a specific chance FOR the PCs to come up with tactics. This item doesn't seem one solved by code, so much as GMing/player culture.

Oh I do when I notice it. @Seraphim73 can attest to that since he's one player who from time to time has specifically asked: "If I do X can I get/give a bonus for Y". You're always welcome to ask and/or bring it to my attention.

I never do pre-mission planning. It's just my thing. I find that sort of RP boring as heck and would much rather drop people straight into the action. I was speaking more about tactics during the mission, which is admittedly harder in air combat than ground combat since lots of Tactics 101 stuff doesn't really apply in space

[kitteh]

@faraday Yeah, in my small bit of reading (to get the flight lingo) I found some... dunno, fighter instruction/tactics stuff and it's all complicated diagrams very specific to the exact two planes engaging. It left me awed at people who do that stuff for realsies but also recommitted to a purely... cinematic level of tactics

So your suggestion is mostly that we should page if we wanna do something specifically cool/unorthodox, over in general just trying to pose solid tactics etc? That's fair enough, and I will try and think about this more going forward (just sitting here, I came up with one I should have used last time!). Though it can/will be hard, I think, for some to figure out what the threshold really is (and to not feel like we're bugging you), especially when the 'standard' for space stuff is frequently flipping your viper around 180 to blast things, etc.

Definitely easier to mess with on the ground! Even for the fliers. At least then there's stuff on the ground to buzz

[TimmyZ]

@Ganymede said in FS3:

Edited to add: regarding Connor McDavid, amassing the most points does not make you the best player on a hockey team.

I'll address the most important topic you brought up

The seasonal points may not be the best measure. But his coaches praise helps get an understanding of where the kids hockey sense is, when the go into review footage with him, he's usually a few steps ahead before they can tell him what needs improvement.

I'd further go with getting the C on his jersey; half the time it seems an honor roll, or good leader half as much off the ice.

There is a lot more to it, maybe he's not yet a top 5, but close. Though young kid with high skills stands, negating the age arguement I think.

And I love FS3 too, not for everyone. Just that seems to always come up in advertisement threads, quick responses of dislike, the age thing got me wanting to point out skill levels weren't necessarily limited by age.

[Arkandel]

@TimmyZ If we look at any gaming mechanics as a RL simulation it won't check out. They're just not meant for that, systems are by their nature simplifications and the results can only make sense if taken with a grain of salt. It's gameplay that's important, not realism; the latter a ship that's sailed.

Now to the sports analogies in particular, even those are really specific. A gymnast has to rely on mobility and athleticism to rote execute specific movies, so their peak is very early; in basketball peak is between 28 and 32 (just look at what LeBron is doing in the 2017 playoffs) when the learning curve of mastering the fundamentals and refining certain technical aspects of their games meets their physical abilities - for instance 2012 LeBron was a beast but he didn't have nearly as good a three-point shot or post game as he does today.

To get back to MU* though... I don't know if I'd play a game using stat degradation with age. RL is enough, I don't need to worry about losing my PC's gains if I don't work at them full time.

[TimmyZ]

@Arkandel I actually agree with what you said. It was the other thread that brought up the age and young child prodigy as unrealistic. If age altering stats actually did come into play, I don't know how long if play such a game either.

[Seraphim73]

For some idea about how quick @faraday is at implementing change, Ares (FS3 3.0) now has combat/distract and a difference between X Evades and X Evades Easily.

[WTFE]

@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:

@Three-Eyed-Crow
I can understand that, I think lot comes down to how we as players see the characters. If they continuously fail at what they are statted to be good at through luck it gets to be irritating because damn it this character is supposed to be good at that.

This is a continual problem in RPGs that a variety of mechanisms have been used to solve. One of my favourite such mechanisms is the one used in ... I want to say CORPS: any difficulty up to your level of expertise is an automatic success. If you have level 7 skill (which is pretty fucking high) any task of up to difficulty 7 is an automatic success. No roll, no nothing. You succeed. If you still WANT to roll (for getting exceptional successes, etc.) you can. And if you choose to go that route you live with the results. But if a basic success is all you're looking for, there's no roll. At all.

The system supported fully all the weirdnesses of things like nobodies KOing a Big Bad by wild-assed lucky rolling, but it didn't mandate wild-assed rolling for every situation. I found that remarkably refreshing after a year of playing a "commando" in ... I want to say Traveller? ... who never managed to successfully hit a target.

[faraday]

@WTFE said in FS3:

The system supported fully all the weirdnesses of things like nobodies KOing a Big Bad by wild-assed lucky rolling, but it didn't mandate wild-assed rolling for every situation. I found that remarkably refreshing after a year of playing a "commando" in ... I want to say Traveller? ... who never managed to successfully hit a target.

FS3 doesn't have an explicit rule for automatic success, but it also doesn't mandate wild-assed rolling for every situation either. In fact, it discourages it. The rules state that characters should only roll if they're under significant stress, facing challenging circumstances, or in conflict with another character.

If you're a professional musician, should you make a +roll just to see if you can play a scale? That's just kind of silly, isn't it? In the end, skill systems are just a hammer. They can't stop you from seeing every problem as a nail.

[WTFE]

The CORPS system has auto-success for any task whose (modified) difficulty level is equal to or under your skill level.

ANY task. At ANY time.

So yes, you only apply the game mechanics under stress, facing challenging circumstances, in conflict with another, etc. You don't go through the process of setting and adjusting difficulty levels to have a pro musician play a scale. It's just that you don't (have to) roll the dice (unless you want to) if the difficulty is below a certain point after adjustment. Experts can be actually expert. Competent people feel competent.

This one simple little rule made CORPS my go-to game for modern and near-modern settings for ages.

[faraday]

@WTFE If it works for you, awesome. Personally though I prefer the element of chance when the circumstances are challenging. Even people who qualify as Expert Marksmen on the target range miss in combat. A lot. Pro musicians sometimes hit wrong notes in the pressure of an important concert. Your sheet tells you what you're baseline capabilities are. Rolls tell how you perform under pressure. FS3 dice stats are slanted compared to many other systems so that people succeed a lot. Competent people can and do feel competent the vast majority of the time. But they can also fail occasionally.

[WTFE]

@faraday said in FS3:

Personally though I prefer the element of chance when the circumstances are challenging.

sigh

One last try before I just assume you're deliberately reading past everything to find things to disagree with.

Even people who qualify as Expert Marksmen on the target range miss in combat. A lot.

And if your skill system is based on range performance this would be a legitimate criticism. But wait, no it wouldn't! Because if you're an expert at the range the difficulty of your shots would rocket way the fuck up in actual combat and ... be still my beating heart ... you'd have to roll!

I mean I did say (several times, now) that it was the adjusted difficulty that was used for this, right? (Hint: Yes. Yes I did.)

Your sheet tells you what you're baseline capabilities are.

No. In most games popular these days your sheet tells you precisely fuck and all of what your capabilities are because most people can't calculate the byzantine odds most games give you on die rolls. But if you have a sane system that you can calculate odds on easily this is still largely irrelevant because...

Rolls tell how you perform under pressure.

... this is true in CORPS as well. All that CORPS does is define what situations are "under pressure" differently. In the CORPS ethos the bar for "under pressure" rises along with your expertise. A neophyte trying to shoot a gangbanger at 15 paces in a brightly-lit street is "under pressure". A grizzled veteran who's been in active combat for two and a half decades isn't going to have that situation register as a credible threat, not to mention consider it "pressure".

FS3 dice stats are slanted compared to many other systems so that people succeed a lot.

This was not my experience with the system. I quite often came out of combats feeling frustrated because my "competent professional" character wasn't able to handle even fucking mooks. The randomness factor was too high and the number of rounds in an average combat was too low. It happened far too often that my characters went through the game like Star Wars' stormtroopers. It only took three or four consecutive bad rolls to come out feeling like you were playing the plucky comedy relief instead of the hero while everybody around you just casually sliced through the opposition like it wasn't there.

Every time it happened I thought back to CORPS and sighed.

[faraday]

@WTFE Well it sounds like FS3 isn't for you and you should make a game with CORPS then. Best of luck to you.

[Seraphim73]

@WTFE In my own system, I did something similar to the autosuccess mechanic you mentioned. When your character is unhurt, not suffering some negative circumstance, and not trying anything tricky (ie, they have the lowest possible target number for their roll), they can trade dice for successes (4:1 trade instead of the 50% odds for each dice when rolling at the lowest possible target number). This means that someone with a Professional rating can trade dice for a simple Success without a chance of failure (on a simple task), or they can roll and hope they roll with the odds and get two successes.

Even for an expert with a 10 skill can only trade for 2 successes, so they're not likely to actually wound someone with 4 dice rolling against them, but they'll nail an inner ring (but not the bullseye) every single time.

As for FS3 being slanted toward succeeding a lot... older versions weren't nearly as success-heavy. Ares is (the TN for success was lowered). Also, when you're in combat, and you have someone rolling against you, things get swing-ier. When you then add in armor penetration and lethality rolls, they get even swingier. It's definitely easy to absolutely fail to hurt an enemy for several turns in a row. It's also possible to hit every single time, do damage every single time, and KO an enemy every single time. It happens. RNG is R. But Ares is better, because successes are easier, so highly competent people hit more often. Still an issue, but it's going to be an issue for most any system except CORPS, it sounds like.

[WTFE]

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

@WTFE In my own system, I did something similar to the autosuccess mechanic you mentioned. When your character is unhurt, not suffering some negative circumstance, and not trying anything tricky (ie, they have the lowest possible target number for their roll), they can trade dice for successes (4:1 trade instead of the 50% odds for each dice when rolling at the lowest possible target number).

In CORPS this would have been handled by these circumstances (wounds, negative circumstances, trick actions) altering the difficulty and, of course, if the difficulty passes the threshold of your skill it's time to roll again.

This means that someone with a Professional rating can trade dice for a simple Success without a chance of failure (on a simple task), or they can roll and hope they roll with the odds and get two successes.

And yes, that's the tradeoff in CORPS as well, albeit by a different mechanism. Only a simple success is automatic. If you want better successes, you have to face the dice, and that includes the possibility of failure results or worse. So...

Even for an expert with a 10 skill can only trade for 2 successes, so they're not likely to actually wound someone with 4 dice rolling against them, but they'll nail an inner ring (but not the bullseye) every single time.

...this circumstance is the case in CORPS as well. If you need higher successes to reach gaps in armour or whatever the automatic single success won't help much. Time to face the die.

But what I like about these systems (yours and CORPS) is that by design they mean you only roll the dice when your reach exceeds your grasp or when the chips are down and you have to do something vitally important. The game is more streamlined, runs faster, and doesn't give you that "stormtrooper marksman" feeling I got when playing a lot of systems (including FS3).

As for FS3 being slanted toward succeeding a lot... older versions weren't nearly as success-heavy.

That may have been what's generated this unmitigated negative reaction I have when I see FS3 touted on a game. I have no idea what version I used when I played. (Having what looks like a version number in the name without it actually being a version number adds to this confusion, I suspect.)

Also, when you're in combat, and you have someone rolling against you, things get swing-ier. When you then add in armor penetration and lethality rolls, they get even swingier. It's definitely easy to absolutely fail to hurt an enemy for several turns in a row. It's also possible to hit every single time, do damage every single time, and KO an enemy every single time. It happens. RNG is R.

I was facing things where I was simply missing all the time. And, as I said, because the combats tended to be so short, it made my competent characters come across as the plucky comic relief when it happened. (And it happened far too often for my tastes.)

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.

Still an issue, but it's going to be an issue for most any system except CORPS, it sounds like.

Or systems like the one you described. Or games like Fate Core/FAE (which is the game that's pretty much replaced CORPS in my affections these days) where you have an economy of fate points; where you can choose to fail (or worse) now to succeed later.

[faraday]

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

As for FS3 being slanted toward succeeding a lot... older versions weren't nearly as success-heavy. Ares is (the TN for success was lowered). Also, when you're in combat, and you have someone rolling against you, things get swing-ier. When you then add in armor penetration and lethality rolls, they get even swingier. It's definitely easy to absolutely fail to hurt an enemy for several turns in a row. It's also possible to hit every single time, do damage every single time, and KO an enemy every single time. It happens. RNG is R. But Ares is better, because successes are easier, so highly competent people hit more often. Still an issue, but it's going to be an issue for most any system except CORPS, it sounds like.

While it's true that 3rd Edition (which is used in Ares) did change the TN, that only shifted the results by a few percentage points. A professional in 3rd ed succeeds at a Routine/Hard task 94%/75% of the time. Compare them to D20 (50/25%) or FUDGE (59/17%) or nWod (83/75%) and you see what I mean when I say that FS3 lets you succeed more often than in most systems. D20 is the worst, actually, because even the highest skill level still botches (not just fails) 5% of the time.

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.

The biggest issue MUSHes have is that you don't have as many rolls to average out the results. In a typical tabletop RPG, a combat might involve dozens of rolls and there'd be one (or more!) every session. Dice get rolled on MU*s far, far less often. With a small sample size, aberrant results jump out more. This is true no matter what system you use.

You can do things like auto-successes or tweaking the probability curves to smooth out those runs of bad luck, but you can only do so much before it's no longer a RNG game and you might as well just compare ratings. ("OK Bob's skill is better. He wins.")

[Tinuviel]

Naturally, as with every system, there's no guarantee of succeeding no matter how good you are. Sometimes you're just unlucky, and sometimes you're just unlucky a whole lot. That's kind of the point of dice rolling.

[Arkandel]

@Tinuviel said in FS3:

Naturally, as with every system, there's no guarantee of succeeding no matter how good you are. Sometimes you're just unlucky, and sometimes you're just unlucky a whole lot. That's kind of the point of dice rolling.

Well, yeah, but for example in the nWoD the bias is definitely in favor of the attacker; there are just many more ways of stacking up punch-dice than block-dice, which was definitely part of the design. Plus in latter editions they give you extra chances of resolving things even more handily if you're just facing mooks by having Werewolves auto-kill humans etc.

The combat system was meant to be fast paced.

[Tinuviel]

Sure. But the idea that simply having X level of skill should be enough to win is missing the entire point of dice rolling.