Posts made by kitteh

I gave it a try too but with this happening just as my interest was flagging I might give up. Dunno.

Staff is lovely, but I think I just ran into my standard WoD game issues (sandboxiness, disconnected concepts), exacerbated by 'everyone is godlike' making it very hard to relate to much of anything going on. Also it wasn't clear if there was really much metaplot outside of what some PCs were running, and if they were running it for staff, it was hard if you couldn't mesh (or even just find like online times) with those people.

@faraday Which we're very thankful for

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

@faraday

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

@faraday

It's a thing in both system, starting maxed, but it matters more when it's the only measure of advancement (WoD usually has tons of parallel things, like you have your stats and skills, but also various powers and merits that you're advancing simultaneously).

@Faraday Sure, maybe? I don't know the dice mechanics internally. Maybe it's perception. But also for things that aren't combat skills (like say, my standard L&L trope of taking fairly high Politics/Intrigue/whatever skill they make for that), it's fairly often opposed rolls with other PCs so the differences might be a bit more pronounced (as they seemed to be in your chart for the current system).

Annnnnnnd if you go back to my reasoning, you'll notice its not even necessarily 9 vs 12, but often something like 7 vs 12, just because its hard to grasp how much you should really take and people who are inherently NOT trying to min-max will often hedge toward caution, and then get steamrolled. Basically I dislike the huge range because it means a lot more guesswork at figuring out what number = 'really good but not twinky good'. That's really what it boils down to. The big scale makes that number hard to gauge, whereas in a standard WoD-esque system the answer is almost always 4

@Thenomain Sure, but on a lot of FS3 games it happens on day 1, and there's no catching up, which is why it can be so anxiety inducing. You're playing twink chicken, sort of, trying to guess the value you can take that will make you relevant in the area you want your character to be good at while not looking so twinky staff gives you the stink eye and labels you a problem player ahead of time. The HUGE range (1-12) makes that guessing difficult.

In comparison, in something like WoD you can grab a 3 or 4 and yeah, maybe some dude has a 5, but it's not that big a difference and you can buy the stat up in probably a month if you want. The first part is true in the new FS3 (which is good), though being able to catch up if you want is not.

@faraday

Oh, I mean I acknowledge that's just my personal feeling on it, but to me the 12 thing was just far too daunting, largely from a chargen perspective. I'd always run into (and I'm facing it right now) the standard situation where you have a bunch of 6s, and the game lets you have X (often 3, maybe this is your default?) skills at 7+. So you bump your big focus to 7. But you have some points left. Do you go to 8, or 9? Well, you probably should, since if you don't you'll never get there in game, right? But then you have a bunch of 6s and then one 9, and it looks really skewed on your sheet (like a middle finger sticking up - that's not metaphorical, its what it looks like when you've got a bunch of 6s and then one 9 sticking out 3-dots higher)! And that makes me feel like I'm twinking, having this one skill so skewed and higher than the others. So maybe I lower it.

And then everyone has 12s and I'm useless.

Obviously, you've moved beyond this so no reason to harp, but... yeah. I'm not exaggerating when I say it would give me anxiety

Re: people wanting more differentiation, I only think that makes sense in a system where there's more progress. If you have both vast skill gaps and almost no advancement, you're going to end up with PCs who basically can't be in the same room with each other without breaking things. Permanently.

Yeah, I do have to say BSGU kind of spoils me. Any criticisms anyone wants to make, it's obvious she's doing tons of work to improve things.

I'm apping on a FS3 (version whatever every game ever has used) game and the 12-point skills in 4 tiers still kind of give me anxiety. Love Faraday but no idea what she was smoking there

Edit: I suspect that old system also has to do a lot with @WTFE's seemingly berserk hatred of it and insistence that people sucked at things even though Faraday says success % was always high. The issue was probably all the generic games using it having really terrible guidance for players / GMs on skill ratings. How do you balance a combat when one guy is skill 1 and one guy is skill 12?

I would imagine the bad name comes more from the out-of-the-box nature of the codebase, which encourages quick, sometimes low quality / protest games using it. Which obviously says nothing about FS3, but it causes people to associate those games with it, and then maybe look for anything to poke at?

It certainly seems like the dice work like they should on the long term (even if we're not strictly getting a 'scientific sample size'), and I think most of us are perfectly OK with that. The multi aces are people with the higher skills who've been in lots of combats. The schlubs perform schlubily. For all the talk earlier about fancy tactical choices or whatever, but it mostly boils down to that.

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. Maybe in WoD you can min-max a whole lot more to have ginormous pools, but presumably those chars should be fighting equivalent challenges. Maybe the one thing in FS3 is that there's less differentiation in what you can do or what you can fight, but that goes with the setting, too. Only so many ways a Viper can pew-pew.

@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.

@The-Sands While I'm sure all of that shooting statistics stuff is true, I'm not sure it's terribly relevant? (Other than the last point, which I agree with)

I think it's the case in many game systems (possibly far more than it's not) that a round's attack roll isn't a single squeeze of the trigger or slash of the sword. With the exception of some really fiddly, hyper-simulationist games, all the 'thrust, parry, parry, thrust' is built into whatever checks you're making (offensively, defensively) and the end result is a result of all of that. 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.'

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, and what could potentially be done about it, and it was pretty constructive. Reducing it to @Three-Eyed-Crow's 'I suck because I miss' is quite uncharitable. In fact this entire thing seems like a weird and sort of mean derail, since we were mostly talking positively about the combat system.

Everything being automated is really the only way I can even handle doing combat on the big scale that these games tend to. Heck, even smaller scale stuff can be a real headache, depending on the level of complexity of the system (ie WoD things where you have 10 different merits and powers from 8 books and all of it's done by hand). So I love just being able to enter one command (at most 2!), wait on the turn to run, and spend the rest of the time reading poses and doing mine with no other pressure.

I've seen FS3 get knocked for the 'generic' style of the system and games but I think it's great if you just want a little bit of system context and then are mostly focused on the RP. And I suspect a GM who wanted to finesse it more could do so with a smaller group and taking the time to do other rolls between automated rounds, apply modifiers per the other thread, etc.

On the topic of things getting stale too quickly vs. using up the Colonies (and I realize it's not meant literally, just that we'd probably want to give them all focus at some point), one thing sort of comes to mind:

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, I definitely think having the colonies available adds a lot to the game.

In a way, a traditional version of the game is kind of doomed to repeat the problems of the show, where eventually you end up with hokey civilian fleet plots about prostitutes and mob bosses and everything military is very same-y.

@DownWithOPP Well I missed those, so I don't mind And we were just at Scorpia before that, which was very different! Shopping, beaches, fancy hotels and ceremonies, etc.

But even on Canceron, presumably the flavor is different? Disaster relief, etc?

Again, I really liked this bit because it was something you don't always see. I mean ultimately, every BSG game is going to be 'fight the cylons, repeat 100x', with some random stuff tossed in for flavor. I thought this flavor was good

@DownWithOPP said in BSG: Unification:

Now can we get off Canceron please? So hating that place now, lol!

Didn't we... just get to Canceron?

It's actually one of the things I like about the game, that it does have a pretty brisk paced episodic kind of structure. Not huge if you're not there for minute 1 and active in every plot you'll never catch up-'episodes', but... like ~2 week stints where we're at place X, doing thing Y, and then we go somewhere else?

This comes a lot closer to feeling like we're RPing the structure of a TV show than most games.

@Ghost Yeah. I mean I totally understand the temptation, especially for people who love the hobby and may not have a ton of options for a particular style of RP, genre, whatever. Or they feel they can play under the radar because staff only handle the big stuff, etc.

But it's definitely a losing proposition in the long term. Sooner or later you'll need their help and it won't be there, or you'll accidentally run afoul of their clique or some other unknown but sacred line that shouldn't be crossed, and by then your investment will be all the more.

Absolutely at both @Paris and @Ghost

We can't trust on magic code to fix things that are otherwise broken. Clearly bad behavior should be easy to report, and relatively easy to act on. One part is on the complainant, and one is on staff. If the first doesn't do their bit, then they can't expect the situation to improve. If the latter doesn't, then they've obviously abdicated their responsibilities and are either indirectly or overtly supporting the behavior.

Abandon ship!