FS3

[faraday]

@Thenomain said in FS3:

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.

Actually I said 9 to 12. Though I probably should have more correctly said 10-12. FS3 2nd Ed breaks the ratings up into four brackets:

1-3 = Novice
4-6 = Proficient/Professional
7-9 = Veteran
10-12 = Master

The idea was that really only the "bracket" matters. Either you're Novice/Prof/Vet/Master. That's it. Pretty simple right? Pick what description best fits your character.

But there were three sub-ratings in each bracket, so you could be a really beginner Novice, or a pretty advanced student Novice, or a junior professional or a pretty senior professional on the cusp of veteran, etc.

In practice it got muddled. People saw some huge difference between 10 and 12 even though stat-wise there isn't one. The bracket idea was either never made clear, or so obtuse that people didn't get it... dang if I know. Some games refused to let you start above 9 at all ever. One BSG game refused to let you have a piloting skill below 4 or above 9, so instead of a 1-12 system, it became a 4-8 system, and then they wondered why there was so little differentiation between the characters.

So I changed it. 3rd ed now has a simplified ratings system that people tend to grok much more easily.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

So on Aether (anyone remember Aether? I know a few of you did), we abstracted a percentile system. People could see their percentile, but when it came to comparison, they only knew how that related to the percentiles of others. That is, did they succeed "overwhelming" or "barely" or somewhere in between? Eventually we revealed the percentage, but only how much better you were.

There was some threat that people would do the math to find out the exact value of someone else's stats, but two things were in our favor.

1. It was Attribute + Skill, and you didn't need to compare the same Attr+Skill between people. This was pretty cool because Warfare + Swords vs. Dex + Dodge. Easy.
2. It reported how the two totals compared. If you're 4% better than someone else, what does that mean? It's not a straight up success/fail system, and (while this wouldn't work for FS3) it meant that people had to decide what this meant. It really forced them to work together.

My favorite application of this in a success/fail system is the "success with drawback" or "fail with partial success" in the middle. I've seen some better than others, but it does mean that even at Maxed Out Perfect there's a chance where you'll have to take a hit.

... I have distracted myself and not directly responded to your post. I hope this is interesting and can help.

[mietze]

I don't mean this in a mean way. But I do not think that any system can realistically fix feelings of being "useless" in a scene where their number is somewhat marginally lower than other people's in that scene.

I only say this because I have heard expressed oocly (and indeed at times have felt personally) the feeling of being "useless" in a scene or group when the dice pool was lower, the same, and even higher than the other people in the scene. Usually truly feeling /useless/ has more to do with not feeling like you have a niche in the group (honestly something that stats really won't fix) or not enjoying the RP or feeling out of one's element in the chemistry of the scene.

Even if all rolls and pools were equal, I think that if there is too much redundancy or there's not chemistry in the scene or if there's not the same level of ooc comfort with things, you are going to have people who will feel useless, and those that are totally oblivious.

[kitteh]

@faraday

Do the nont-tier dots literally not do anything? IE they're only there for XP-padding purposes?

[faraday]

@kitteh Each bump in level gives you an extra die to roll. But that die becomes progressively more meaningless the more your die pool grows, unless you're going up against an equally-skilled opponent. For example, the difference between skill 1 and skill 2 (assuming average attr) is 57%/68%. Between 11 and 12 is 97/98%.

[kitteh]

@faraday I was just wondering if the tier-splits themselves matter, since you kind of emphasized them.

[faraday]

@kitteh No I was just trying to explain the ideal of how the system worked in my head. Ideal met reality though and it didn't work out as I intended. Hence: 3rd ed.

[kitteh]

@faraday Which we're very thankful for

[ThatGuyThere]

@WTFE said in FS3:

True randomness sadly, given the flaws in the human brain's construction, never appears random.

^ This can not be stated enough when looking at random results.

Human brains have evolved to notice patterns, there are numerous survival advantages to this, however our brains are good enough that we will find patterns to things where there are no patterns.
For example even though I know full well that this is not there case there are still moments I am half convinced that the roller on Fallcoast knows when I am making an important roll and chooses those moments to crap out on me. Minor rolls I will do great big moment I have bad luck. This is 100 percent luck and possibly not even the case as greater amounts of rolls have likely averaged things out by now but my brain noticed a pattern early on and sticks with that belief.
I have also had players accusing another player in a table top I ran because he was lucky, all roles where done where i could see him and over the course of the campaign he was no luckier than anyone else but he got all his luck during boss fights so two other players became convinced he was fudging roles. My response which annoyed them was, if he is good enough to roll good on cu he would be going to the boats every Saturday making money not playing D+D in a basement with us.

It is true we often will notice the oddness more often on line than off but there are two reasons for this, first and most obvious is that there are a lot fewer rolls so there are less opportunities for actual results to regress towards expected, and a great feeling of lack of control since we cannot perform our lucky dice rolls. (True not all gamers have a dice roll ritual but I have known enough that do, including myself that I beleive a significant minority do.)

[ThatGuyThere]

@kitteh said in FS3:

I'm not sure FS3 gets singled out here since no game system (that I know of) is performing 1000 rolls and averaging them to determine success/failure.

I think part of the reason it gets singled out is that it is only played on line. For example while WoD MU* besides combat do not really involve more +rolls than those using FS3 a large portion of the WoD MU* players also have played it in table top so their minds contain a much larger sample size and that experience colors how they look at the results on the game.

[Thenomain]

@ThatGuyThere

I believe you're right, but I think our typical 3-round WoD combat of, say, 6 total participants (PCs and NPCs) probably has around 18 (combat) + 12 (preparation) = 30 rolls. If we're lucky. That is a huge sample size, and skews what we know of WoD. Mind you, WoD also has one billionty thousand permutations of attributes, skills, powers, and other nonsense, many of them designed to completely overwhelm the situations we tend to have (i.e., combat and precious little else).

I guess my point here is that it's just important how you play a game as what the stat system looks like.

[Lotherio]

@Thenomain said in FS3:

@ThatGuyThere

I believe you're right, but I think our typical 3-round WoD combat of, say, 6 total participants (PCs and NPCs) probably has around 18 (combat) + 12 (preparation) = 30 rolls. If we're lucky. That is a huge sample size, and skews what we know of WoD. Mind you, WoD also has one billionty thousand permutations of attributes, skills, powers, and other nonsense, many of them designed to completely overwhelm the situations we tend to have (i.e., combat and precious little else).

I guess my point here is that it's just important how you play a game as what the stat system looks like.

You're sample size is equivalent to FS3. In a group combat most players hit. But the nay sayer may only be watching their role, do they can pose timely maybe? @ThatGuyThere may be spot in that it's only online with far less history if us watching roles for gestalt theory to allow us to see the actual balance.

[ThatGuyThere]

Yeah while 30 rolls is a good sample size for one combat, I would say that since I picked up a copy of Werewolf 1st edition 25 years ago it is not an exaggeration to say that between online and table top that i have seen 10,000 WoD rolls counting both OWoD and NWoD together. Most of that undoubtedly in table top, given FS3 is only online I wouldn't even want to think about the amount of time I would need to RP to get to even a tenth of that number of rolls with FS3 or any iteration.

[Thenomain]

But as was said earlier, testing what the system does via brute force (Monte Carlo) or via straight up analysis doesn't change perceptions. You don't just make games to fit a certain model, but to fit a certain feel. Is that feel to make the characters bullet sponges, or is it to make it extremely hard to hit anything but to make that rare hit count? Is an ace pilot one that hits better or one that comes back from more missions?

Most of what I see in this thread is disagreement of expectations.

[Seraphim73]

@ThatGuyThere I think that thousands of rolls happen faster than you might think in FS3 2nd Edition. Uh... yeah... so here's where I remind everyone that I'm a massive system nerd. I've probably got about 5,000 individual FS3 rolls under my belt over the last five years. Considering that in FS3 2nd Edition each attack in +combat actually causes 2-7 rolls (attack, defense, hit location, armor penetration, armor reduction, lethality, KO--way more if you're firing burst, autofire, or using an explosive weapon), and I've run a lot of +combats for fun, for testing, and for scenes... I wouldn't be surprised at all if I've seen the results of more than 5,000 rolls in FS3 (that's only 1000ish attacks). Granted, a large number of those didn't have RP alongside them, just testing out the system, but still... FS3 2nd Edition got a lot of banging on it. Unless you meant each attack as a roll, then yeah... I'm probably somewhere down around 1,000ish.

[faraday]

@Seraphim73 You know for a moment I was like: "Dude you COUNTED them?!?!" Because it was plausible that you might have.

But actually - yeah, having played a metric ton of FS3 myself (both on my own games and on others'), maybe I've also generated enough of a sample size to see the wider curve.

[Ganymede]

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

I think that thousands of rolls happen faster than you might think in FS3 2nd Edition. Uh... yeah... so here's where I remind everyone that I'm a massive system nerd. I've probably got about 5,000 individual FS3 rolls under my belt over the last five years. Considering that in FS3 2nd Edition each attack in +combat actually causes 2-7 rolls (attack, defense, hit location, armor penetration, armor reduction, lethality, KO--way more if you're firing burst, autofire, or using an explosive weapon), and I've run a lot of +combats for fun, for testing, and for scenes... I wouldn't be surprised at all if I've seen the results of more than 5,000 rolls in FS3 (that's only 1000ish attacks).

Jesus.

And here I am thinking: "Man, I like FS3, and I'm going to use it as inspiration to simplify my own system!"

I still like it. But what I'm working on is simpler still, and I'm happy for that.

As for WoD, the rolls to take fucking forever because of the discussion on what to roll:

• What's my Attribute?
• What's my Ability?
• What Merits/Flaws modify the pool?
• What situational factors modify the pool?
• What equipment modify the pool?
• What specialties modify the pool?
• What Powers modify the pool?
• Will I spend Willpower to modify the pool?
• Where's my car?

And that's one side of it.

So, I like FS3's code which handles all of that, and tells you: BITCH PLZ THIS BE WUT YOU GET SHADDAP.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede said in FS3:

And here I am thinking: "Man, I like FS3, and I'm going to use it as inspiration to simplify my own system!"

Remember though that on a MUSH things are different because you can automate so much, whereas on table-top everything has to be done by hand. So maybe you can hide some of that complexity behind the code (since it knows the target's armor/defense, the weapon's penetration and modifiers, etc).

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in FS3:

Remember though that on a MUSH things are different because you can automate so much, whereas on table-top everything has to be done by hand. So maybe you can hide some of that complexity behind the code (since it knows the target's armor/defense, the weapon's penetration and modifiers, etc).

... it's like you didn't read the second part of my post, and that makes me sad.

Anyhow, my aim is to simplify the system without falling back to code. My hope is this will make the coding easier and more attractive to others.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede said in FS3:

@Arkandel said in FS3:

Remember though that on a MUSH things are different because you can automate so much, whereas on table-top everything has to be done by hand. So maybe you can hide some of that complexity behind the code (since it knows the target's armor/defense, the weapon's penetration and modifiers, etc).

... it's like you didn't read the second part of my post, and that makes me sad.

I have failed my clan and disgraced my people. <headhangs>

Anyhow, my aim is to simplify the system without falling back to code. My hope is this will make the coding easier and more attractive to others.

I think many coders would actually like this. Back in the day we had an ambitious project about automating turn-based combat completely - where you'd literally type "hit arkandel left shoulder" and it'd just take care of it based on your stuff and my own, all under the hood.

The idea was... ah, nm, that'd be off topic here. Sorry about that.