@The-Sands I think the dots are misleading you though because a 7-vs-7 is better than 8-vs-8 and 8-vs-8 is better than 9-vs-9. Basically the higher you are the better you are at dodging, so the attacker has a lower chance of success. I can see where you might want same-vs-same to work differently, but it is at least internally consistent. I'm fine with how it is.
I really didn't mean to reopen any of this and I'm not sure why this whole post is @me.
Oh I didn't mean for the whole post to be at you. Just the quirks of the bbs reply thing. I just wanted to make sure it was clear that no criticism was aimed at you.
@The-Sands said in FS3:
@faraday Actually, 2d6 isn't really a bell curve. It's a pyramid shape. ... The thing with the 'many dice' systems is that they aren't real bell curves and they have some terribly awkward spots.
Technically you're not wrong about 7 being most probable, but just about every textbook depiction of 2d6 probability shows it as a bell curve so I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful.
I know this is a crappy chart but I just wanted a quick illustration. It shows the chance of hitting (an opposed roll with ties going to the attacker) at varying skill levels in FS3 3rd ed. A 1 (dark blue bottom line) has virtually no chance against a 12, and a pretty decent chance against a fellow 1. I'm not saying this is a bell curve (obviously). I'm just saying I think it's a pretty straightforward progression with no weird peaks or valleys or jumps where 1 extra skill level gets you some tremendous advantage. But maybe I'm missing your point?
@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 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.
Could we pretty please take the discussion of FS3 combat mechanics and realism and whatnot over to the FS3 thread?
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.
@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:
My WoD Initiative code works very similarly, but there are a billion little setup things that supernatural beings can do, and coding an intelligent Mu*-side interface for that isn't sunshine and roses, either. Rounds, turns, minutes, hours, scenes, advantages, disadvantages, etc. etc. I mean, if I wanted to code combat to that level, I'd code a Mud.
Right. That's one advantage of having a system that's designed for combat code from the ground up. There are no advantages/disadvantages in FS3 -- not because I dislike the idea of them, but because they add too much complexity. That's also why it doesn't translate well to games with infinitely-flexible superpowers. You can model some powers as attacks, stances, etc. but WTF do you do with an ice blast that freezes somebody for a turn, or a Quicksilver type power that lets you run rings around your opponents? It just doesn't work out too well.
@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.
@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.)
@Auspice said in BSG: Unification:
Personally, I'm hoping for a multi-day (3-5~) recon team mission at some point. But I may be one of the only ones cool with being off the main grid for that long.
Yeah I don't have a problem with it as long as the people involved volunteer to go off-grid. Don't like to force that on people.
@SG The reason combats go fast is that there's no pose order. The combat system spits out all the results at once at the beginning of the turn, so everyone has the same frame of reference for what happened. They can just pose their reactions and their intent for the next turn.
Sure, occasionally you get a situation where somebody needs to tweak something after seeing Bob's pose, or wants to wait for Bob's pose before they go, but the vast majority of poses can just come in any order. Even with 10+ people, you can get through a turn in 15 minutes or less.
@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.
@Ganymede Well some scenes go smoother than others, but 2 hours is always the goal. That scouting mission was really cool, but doing something like that with 12 people would take all day
@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.")
@kitteh said in BSG: Unification:
This isn't Star Wars/Trek and there's nothing saying these these all have to be Hoth or Planet of Hats style things where each colony is a single overwhelming theme. A planet is pretty big, so there's a lot of room to shake things up a bit, even within a mini-arc. No reason we have to go down to the same jungle every time when we're launching from a fancy space ship in orbit, etc.
Yeah the theme files are explicit about the fact that each of the Colonies (except Aquaria) are entire planets with varying terrain. But most of the operations are focused on a narrow geographical region for manageability. It just so happened that both of the Canceron storylines focused on the tropics.
@WTFE Well it sounds like FS3 isn't for you and you should make a game with CORPS then. Best of luck to you.
@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.
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.
@Seraphim73 can attest to the fact that I was a little leery of returning to Canceron again since we were just there I mean sure we could've done "earthquake on Caprica" or "tsunami on Leonis" but all those things felt a little random. The disaster relief story seemed to fit Canceron the best.
I don't know quite where the sweet spot is for campaign length, but a frequent change of scenery is definitely something I think is key to the game's concept. The freedom of being able to go different places was the primary reason I picked a First Cylon War setting over the traditional Second War one.
@DownWithOPP There's this one: http://aresmush.com/fs3/fs3-3/combat-quickref/
It doesn't cover the organizer commands but I can add that. Or you can use the online help: http://mush.aresmush.com:8081/help/fs3combat/org
@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:
....
Why don't we have more web based combat setup systems? I mean, besides that most hosting systems can't process this.
Because it's a PITA to code, mainly. Web UIs take a lot of work.
I could to it, for sure, but I'd like to understand more what @DownWithOPP is talking about. Setting up a combat takes me about 30 seconds, so I think something may be getting lost in translation here.
combat/start <-- gets you a combat number, say 54
combat/join Harry Joe Mary=54/Viper <-- adds some Viper pilots
combat/join Raider1 Raider2 Raider=54/Raider <-- adds some badguys
There are similar options for adding people as Raptor pilots, Centurions, Heavy Raiders, Unarmed (for Raptor ECOs), etc. All their weapons/vehicles/armor should be set up for them automatically. From there, the individual players can fine-tune things if they've got a weird weapon or something, but those exceptions are few and far between.
So I guess I'm not quite understanding what's such a pain to set up?
Thanks for the review @DownWithOPP. A couple misc. replies:
Re: Scheduling... yeah that's a totally fair assessment. Later evening EST is our peak activity time (we have a lot of PST people), and it's what fits best with my schedule personally. But I don't think EST folks are completely SOL. Most events start around 9pm and run 2 hours, which seems to be the happy middle ground between EST and PST. And as you said, players are empowered and encouraged to run their own events whenever suits them.
Actually - Friday's event started at 10pm because I had some PST folks complain that the 9pm events were too early! It's all perspective.
Re: Bugs. I think "bugs galore" is a bit of an overstatement. I mean, yeah, it's beta and there are bugs, but the system is pretty stable over all. What bugs we have tend to be pretty minor and fixed quickly.