Posts made by faraday

@Three-Eyed-Crow combat/log is still available for everyone. It wasn't in the first version @Seraphim73 graciously field-tested for me, but it's been added since at his recommendation.

@kitteh I can look into adding different evade messages, sure.

I think it's also worth clarifying that there's never really a situation where the PCs are seriously outclassed in random combats. The basic NPC levels are 4/6/8. Even Rookie chars like Callie and Cap are 8's, putting them on par with the toughest NPCs and meaning they hit about half the time.

Now I get that missing half the time can still be frustrating, but I think it's important to keep it in perspective that far more often it's the badguys who are seriously outclassed even against low-powered characters. When PCs miss, it's usually just bad luck. There's no accounting for dice.

@Ominous - Personally I tend to prefer capping younger chars in app review ("yes you can be an olympic gynmast, no you cannot also be an expert at medicine and marksmanship too") rather than giving older characters a carte blanche point bonus, but I understand that everyone has different preferences on that score.

Other random comments to various peoples' points:

• Yes, you can suppress with any weapon. Even melee weapons. There it just represents feints and distractions.
• All ranged attacks add to the target's combat stress, but the specific 'suppress' action adds much more.
• I misspoke earlier. Suppression/stress doesn't make it easier to hit the target. But maybe it should. Will ponder.

@Thenomain For the record I have no issues with the suggestions @kitteh has made nor the tone of them. This thread has been refreshingly constructive. But I appreciate the support.

@kitteh said in FS3:

Not a big deal. It only frustrates me to the degree that it gets a little boring just having to pose the same pose in different ways every round of combat and not having any good clue of an alternate strategy or anything that would fix it. Again I'm not especially interested in kill count, but I would like things that improve verisimilitude in the squad tactics, encourage team communication, etc.

I'm all for improving team communication, tactics, etc. But so far the only concrete suggestion I've seen as to how to do that was to make the NPC levels visible, which I explained why I wasn't going to do. If I've missed a different suggestion as to how to improve these things, I apologize - maybe you could point me to it again?

To take on a (slightly) different topic it would be good if the... suppression things or other multiple-people on a target stuff was more obviously helpful? ... Not only do you not really see that you're helping (and thus, posing that you're helping can be assuming things not visible, and even kind of power-posing to a degree) but OOCly you may also be frustrating your (more skilled) wingmate as you're essentially cockblocking them on kills if you do hit (even for probably negligible damage).

The suppression emit message is like so:

<FS3Combat> Calliope suppresses Raider22 with Ecm.
<FS3Combat> Calliope tries to suppress Raider21 with Ecm but FAILS.

Do you mean just make the first message say "SUCCESS" more blatantly? I can do that. If that's not what you meant, I'm afraid I don't understand in what way it's unclear whether you're helping or not.

Suppression does no damage, so you're not kill-blocking anyone by doing it. It applies a negative modifier to the target, making them easier to hit and less likely to hit your buddy.

@Thenomain said in FS3:

Hidden number systems push the drama of another sort (I'm told that in the Walking Dead TV series some guy was thought to have The Cure and he was lucking out bluffing the whole time), and I think that FS3 is not meant to be a tabletop/wargame simulator like D&D...

Well it's interesting that you mention D&D or tabletop games, because when was the last time you played tabletop and the GM told you what the badguy's skill was? I mean, maybe we've played different types of games, but in my experience the GM usually rolled behind the screen. Unless you were fighting someone like "Bob The Gang Leader" who was obviously a Big Bad, you had no idea whether BadGuy1 was a henchman or a boss or what.

The big difference I think between FS3 and tabletop is that in tabletop you get feedback about what your roll was. So you could know "Man I rolled 12 dice and whiffed! The dice hate me!" In FS3 combat it's as if the PC's rolls are rolled behind the screen too. So all you really know is that you had 12 dice and somehow he dodged.

Personally I think this fits with the IC perception, because your character also has no clue why he missed. He just knows that the other guy dodged.

At any rate, I respect @kitteh's POV immensely, but the in-game poll I did backs up my personal feeling that NPC skill levels should remain hidden to preserve the IC mystery. It saddens me if this frustrates anyone, but I think it falls into the "you can't please everybody" category.

If you're running a game with FS3, like Theno said it's a 1-line code change to expose the combat/skills summary to everyone and not just to the combat organizer.

... Edit to add ... I could easily change the code to show your rolls in combat too so you'd know if you whiffed, but it's already crazy spammy. I'd worry about making it moreso.

@kitteh It's cool, the feedback is good to have. I really do want to make the system better, but it will never satisfy everyone.

As an aside, I realized... you can tell the difference between a clean miss and a dodge by the combat output:

<FS3Combat> Raider8 attacks Kazimir with Kew but Kazimir EVADES!

<FS3Combat> Fish attacks Raider4 with Kew but MISSES!

If your target is constantly evading you, that probably means they're better than you skill-wise (or you're just having a really bad day). You can react to that as you see fit ICly, whether that means calling for help, switching targets, or kicking oneself for not being able to hit.

There are already measurable code benefits to teaming up with a wingman, as we've mentioned. If there's any way to better facilitate this in the code or just in the way the scenes are run, I'm happy to hear it.

@Seraphim73 suggested combat/assist - letting someone sacrifice an action to help somebody else. I didn't think it would be used that much (in general people like to shoot, not support, and I don't blame them), but more importantly - I realized there's already a command for this in the system: combat/suppress. "Suppression" natively reflects suppressive fire in ground combat, but you can use it for any situation where you're trying to distract / intimidate / etc. the opponent.

@Auspice said in FS3:

And then some of you saw how my dice treated me in that shooting competition. Even spending a luck point to reroll, she came out near the bottom. If I hadn't spent that luck point? She would've been the worst.

Yeah, results like that are kind of silly. There are ways to mitigate that with the way you score results, though.

I think if the contest was more like: Failure/Success = Hit the target, Good success = In the inner ring, Great success = hit the bullseye, and also had more than three shots (the Army marksmanship contest is 40 in contrast)... the results would have been very different.

This is not a knock against the player who ran that event AT ALL - they're awesome and I appreciate the effort. I think it's more of a cautionary tale about when and how to apply roll results. Any time you invoke dice you invite fluke results, and you have to ask yourself... does this really make sense ICly?

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

Edited to add: Sometimes it really is just the dice. Back on The Fifth World, we had a basic NPC Hostile soldier who stayed in combat for like 3-4 turns with a -20 to -35 penalty. It wasn't that it was any better than the others, it just kept rolling the 25% chance of success on 1 die.

Yeah I fixed that with the latest patch of 3rd edition. NPCs will just die when they get to a certain level of damage, because otherwise it's just silly.

@kitteh said in FS3:

However we can't RP that if we don't actually know the raider is more skilled.

But... why not? I mean, is it not enough that everybody was trying to hit him and couldn't, or that the Raider just took out two of your guys before Harvey finally brought him down? Maybe stuff like that is a little subtle and more readily attributed to luck, but like you said - when three of you are all hammering at the guy and he just won't die that should show that he's unusual, right?

@kitteh Well, actually there are inherent bonuses in the system to pairing up, in terms of suppression, increased odds of damaging the targets (which makes them even easier to finish off) and reducing the number firing back at you. I think to some degree it's the IC and OOC motivation of kill-counting that makes people more interested in soling targets, because you see a very different behavior from players in ground combat.

And yes, sticking to your target is good practice, but anyone who's played Wing Commander or some other air combat simulator without "target lock" knows how tough that is in a swirling dogfight

@kitteh said in FS3:

@faraday OK! They show as 1/4 and 1/12 but if that's just a visual error, fair enough!

Re: the combat stuff, maybe it would be good if there was some indication of who the elite enemy pilots are?

I worried that there would be the opposite effect - that people would just pick off the low-hanging fruit to buff their kill count and then gang up on the big bad at the end.

My vision for how it would play out is that someone would be like: "Frak! I keep missing! What is UP with this guy? Hey Wingman - lend a hand would you?" But that doesn't really seem to be how it works out.

But I'll open up a discussion in-game so people can weigh in. I'm not dead-set on how it works at the moment.

Edit: Also is exceptional = elite? The word-instead-of-number stuff is a little confusing.

Exceptional is for attributes. It means you're gifted with natural talent, basically. Elite is a skill, representing the peak of knowledge/training/experience.

So to @TimmyZ's point about athletes, you might expect a young hockey sensation to have Exceptional Reflexes and Great skill (5+5 = 10 dice) whereas a 30-year-old captain might have declined to Good Reflexes but now has an Expert skill (4+6 = 10 dice). At some point the sensation might keep going up and the captain might keep going down, but this varies. Just as I'm willing to accept a young character who's a prodigy, I'm also willing to accept an old character who's gone out of their way to maintain their physical condition.

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

That said, I think that gamers are (to some degree) competitive by nature. We like our numbers to go up, we like our numbers to be at least in the same ball-park as those of our fellow players, and some of us like to brag about having bigger numbers...

I don't disagree, but this is simply not something I see as a problem needing to be solved. The difference between Great and Expert is a few percentage points. If someone's going to be bent out of shape just because their rating only says "Great" and Bob's says "Expert" and they can't catch up to Bob....that's on them. They had a chance to start out as "Expert" too.

@kitteh said in FS3:

I could see the dice pools being rolled and it seemed like everyone either matched (at the thing I was good at) or exceeded me, but maybe that was a small selection, I dunno.

When you're talking about a character's core professional skills, there are really only 3 common values - Good/Great/Expert. Occasionally there's a rookie with Fair (like @Three-Eyed-Crow) and very rarely there's an Elite, but most are 4-6. So yeah, there's not a huge amount of variation. That was one of the sacrifices made in the move from 2nd Ed. to 3rd Ed. by compressing the ratings chart - a choice of simplicity over flexibility (since the bigger range was causing no end of confusion and nitpicking).

The thing in combat is that it mostly seems like I miss all the time. Even when I'm piling on bonuses (I was whiffing with luck and aggressive stance). Maybe that was a string of really terrible luck, I dunno.

Since people tend to pick a target and stick with it until it's dead, sometimes what happens is you've picked one of the higher-rated badguys without realizing it. Also, most combats are over in 6-8 rounds, so while it takes a few hours of RL, you really don't have a ton of rolls there to even things out if you're just having a string of bad luck. I don't know what can really be done about either of these things but I'm open to suggestions.

Isn't Fair to Good 4 months? I see 1/4 on my thing, anyway. And after that it's a year, right? Those are both pretty big chunks of time.

Fair -> Good was supposed to be 3, that's just a glitch. And Good -> Great is "only" 4 more months. I know that's a good chunk of time in MUSH timelines, but it's still very compressed compared to RL.

I'm totally fine if people don't like it. But it's done that way on purpose. FS3 doesn't have a 'dino' problem because of the slow advancement. You can be fresh out of chargen and be on par with existing characters in the skills that matter most for your character.

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

I would be that this isn't something that Faraday is particularly interested in, because it would involve re-writing chargen, but if it were something that she -was- interested in, it's as simple as just giving new players a bunch of XP and letting them buy up skills/attributes with it.

Yeah, I have zero interest in doing that because it goes radically against the two core tenets of FS3: 1) Fast and easy chargen, and 2) You can start at good at what you do. I'm sick of systems that make you start at level 1 and work your way up. If you want to start out as a hotshot fighter pilot, then start out as a hotshot fighter pilot. Also, ironically, systems that have complex math in chargen usually make me min-max because inevitably I don't have enough points to make up the character I want. I want to be good at something and well-rounded.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a system that treats advancement the same as chargen, but that's just not my system. It would be like me going to the D20 game designers and saying: "You know what guys? This system wouldn't be so bad if you would just get rid of levels." Levels are a core part of the system.

@kitteh said in FS3:

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?

I'd have to look at your skills to have more insight, but just as an example - to go from Everyman (which is 'dude off the street who's never sat in a Viper before') to Fair (junior professional level) takes only 3 RL months. Getting to Good after that (solid professional level) is another 3 months. With the new XP system, you can do that with multiple skills during that same timeframe. So I don't think it's true that someone who's "really bad" at something is stuck that way.

That's really not that far off from what you see in the show with the Viper nuggets IMHO - especially considering that a lot of them had some civvie piloting experience before and weren't starting from scratch. Also for the Viper nuggets on BSG:Pacifica I gave them some bonus XP to represent the intensive nature of their training. The regular XP assumes you're just learning in your spare time or improving through regular use.

Stat-wise, It's not like someone who's Good completely sucks compared to an Expert. I mean, yes, obviously the Expert has an edge, but it's not tremendous unless they're going up against each other. Against the garden-variety badguys, they'll both do pretty well.

And that again touches on a key component of FS3, which is that it's designed for cooperative PvE games. Letting characters start out at different power levels makes no sense if you're going to pit them against each other.

@Runescryer @ThatGuyThere The system includes a link right there in 'help FS3', so they would've had to actually go out of their way to remove it. Now, to be fair, the documentation for 2nd edition isn't the greatest. That's another thing I've tried to remedy with 3rd ed's guides.

@Runescryer Recent versions of FS3 spit out the die results and highlights successes. Success level is just based on the number of successes. It's really just Shadowrun 4's die mechanics with D8's instead of D6's

<FS3> Faraday rolls Firearms: Success (8 5 4 4)

@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:

Every game system I have ever seen punishes players for diversifying.

Agreed. This is one of the problems I tried to mitigate a bit, though, in 3rd edition by giving you a bunch of background skills completely free. You're not penalized in any way for having a modest number of hobbies and interests.

To look at the punishment thing another way though... look at a system like D20. Say that you allow some players to start at level 4 while others start at level 1, which is pretty much exactly what FS3 does. Isn't it kind of expected that the guy who chose to start at level 4 would have a mechanical advantage over the guy who chose to start at level 1? Or the guy who chose to multi-class at level 2/level 2? Are the lower guys being "punished" or are they just experiencing the effects of their choices?

Here it the blurb about this effect in the 3rd edition documentation:

Some characters will have higher AP totals than others. Is that fair? Sure it is, as long you realize that it’s the player’s choice. Characters in FS3 have equal opportunity, but ultimately you pick what you want to play.

The system is designed so that abilities central to the game’s “action” cost more than other abilities. A Navy SEAL will obviously have more action-oriented skills than a master cook (unless the cook is also Stephen Seagal). They’re both great at what they do - one just needs more AP to get there.

But why would you want to play a lower-powered character in the first place? Why not maximize your allowable AP rating?

Dice are fun, but story is the most important thing. Telling a story about a wide-eyed young recruit or sidekick can be fun. And John McClane in Die Hard wasn’t particularly powerful, but he’s one of the most badass action heroes ever. In the right story, everyone can have a chance to shine.

If you're going to use FS3 for your game, it's up to you to give everyone a chance to shine regardless of how they spent their points.

You might be surprised what happens when you de-emphasize the points (they're in a non-obvious place in 3rd edition) and put players into a cooperative environment where they're not pitted against each other. We've had a lot of characters come through BSGU who didn't even spend their maximum AP.

@TimmyZ said in FS3:

Deliberately encouraging or forcing specialist approach isn't necessarily by design.

Yeah, I mean... the system lets you enforce skill limits. You can force the doctor (in code, not just in app review) to be well-rounded instead of just pumping all his points into Medicine if that's what you want for your game.

You can also completely configure the XP progression to fit any model you want. You could completely disable any raises above level 4. You could restrict them to only have 1 skill at 7+. You can make XP a flat cost instead of exponential, to mirror chargen. The fact is that most games don't leverage these features, and then people throw up their hands and say 'the system is designed to suck'.

At the end of the day, it's not about pure realism and it's not about pure fairness. It's about blending the two together in a way that suits the game you're trying to run.

@TimmyZ Actually I agree completely. Age has absolutely no relation to skill, which is why FS3 does not give you any bonuses for age. On BSGU you'll see as many 20's characters with Expert level as you will 30's characters.

I do think that your background should justify your skills whatever they are. If you're a Veteran at Firearms because you've got 20 years experience or a Veteran at Firearms because you're 20 and have been training for the Olympics, either one works for me.

Physical abilities - sure, you could make that argument as a sweeping generalization, but there are plenty of RL athletes and whatnot that buck the trend. (My 70-something year old tae kwon do master who can totally kick my butt being one who jumps immediately to mind). PCs are supposed to be the exceptions, so I don't feel obliged to punish them for being older.

At any rate, someone said it in the other thread... FS3 is not designed to be super realistic and model everything. It's designed to be simple. 2nd edition was okay, 3rd has made various improvements around making it even easier to pick your skills without fretting over whether your background skill in Baseball should be a 2 or a 3, or whether that extra point you're spending on First Aid is going to cripple your chances for being awesome in Piloting.

It is not a perfect system because there's no such thing as a perfect system. Everyone has their desired goals for what they want the system to model, and different tolerances for abstractions and generalizations.

@Packrat said in Fifth Kingdom:

It would take the second person 6+7 or fifteen weeks to raise (Skill2) to 8.

Minor point - in the default configuration it takes 24 weeks (almost half a year) to go from 4 to 8. You can change that configuration. I usually raise the costs above 4 significantly.

But otherwise, yes, your analysis is spot on and reflects the intended mechanics of FS3. Becoming an expert in something during the course of the game is extremely difficult. Raising a few secondary skills to student or hobbyist levels of proficiency is extremely easy.

@Ganymede BSGU uses FS3 Third Edition. The rules are publicly available but the code is not (yet), so... you're kind of stuck with 2nd unless you're willing to customize the code.

@TimmyZ, @Packrat isn't referring to pool limit, but to the fact that someone who spends 8 chargen points on Melee: 6 / Hunting: 1 / Politics: 1 will have a perceived OOC disadvantage versus someone who spends 8 points on Melee: 8 and plans to just buy up Hunting and Politics later very cheaply with XP. I don't want to derail your thread with an argument over why it is the way it is, but nevertheless, some people don't like the way the system works.

The design of FS3 expects you to combat this with a soft app review (e.g. "no, sorry, there's no way your nobleman doesn't know how to ride or deal with politics - spend some points in those") and by setting minimal starting skills. For example, on BSGU everyone has to start with a set of skills to represent basic military training, plus some background skills. As long as you meet those minimums, you can min/max yourself to your heart's content.

@HelloProject I guess it depends on what you mean by "straight up". Like any software toolkit, knowing the base language is only half the battle. Then you need to learn the specific libraries and whatnot from the toolkit. I know Python, but I don't know Evennia. There would be a learning curve if I wanted to work on it.

@HelloProject said in Computer Science:

Oh, I'm also learning regular code language shit. I mostly want to learn MUSH code for fun and also for recreational educational purposes.

Sure, I just meant that by learning Evennia code for instance you can do both - improve your regular actual useful Python skills AND do recreational coding for a game. (I hear Shadowrun is looking for an Evennia coder.) Or learn Lua to write scripts for your favorite MMO or FPS. MUSHcode was an impressive feat of design back in the 80's, don't get me wrong, but by today's standards it's a monstrosity. I would never advocate anybody learning it just for fun.

But yes, I agree with @Thenomain and @Jim-Nanban about learning by doing. My guide has the same advice and walks you through the functions needed to build +who and +finger (which are the examples at the end).