Posts made by Misadventure

What's old is new again when bandying about jocularities. Also, the game lost my attention at that point, and hasn't picked it up again. So.

A game with terrible controls?

Not really my thing.

I don't know how well it works, but the idea that the card approach replaces the reaction time constraint with another seems a good fit. I have played En Garde, where you queued up several very brief moves and compared how they played out, and that was too ... "hope it does something interesting" to me. Too granular (they tracked where you were in a move in a very rough way, and where one player was in their sequence when an attack happened guided the results). In theory a good designer could make sure that cards presented interesting choices. That Yomi game has hundreds of games tracked for deck performance etc.

I also played Flashing Blades, where the one nod to prediction was that A) each weapon only had a few moves (thrust, slash, strike), and if you guessed which your opponent used, you got a bonus to your parry roll. That turned out to be drudgery.

Another consideration is that fighter games are based around a (relatively) complex system of choices in combat that allow the players to know what the options are, and what the best options are, what those options look like in their opening animation frames, in a given combat situation, and react within those constraints to try to out predict and out twitch response the other player. The reward is brief domination in combat. Enough domination and you win the fight. (By domination I mean one move happens the other is interrupted or prevented).

This constraint of choices combined with expertise is what makes the game. In a non-real time environment, it would at best devolve to just guessing. It would be possible to make a flow chart describing something like stance and tactical situation so that the players could begin that predictive process (from this current stance, there are only 3 viable moves) but even then it's just random guessing.

There is a card game called Yomi, named for the process described at the start of this post, and it replaces twitch time with the limitations of card hands to try to make it fun. Attaching it to a RPG would be about the only way you could pull all that off and carry the feel of a fighter. Unless you just like the characters, and don't care about how hard it is to pull of their moves, just that they can.

That example was already made, without the antagonism.

Glenn! Glenn Glenn Glenn !
Glenn Glenn Glenn,
Glenn Glenn Glenn.
Glenn's the man ...

Hey it's a brisk 69 here at 10:36 am, and I think there might be haze.

I may have to point my fan away from me a little or I'll get cold.

I wanted to add that the more traits a system has to buy (attributes, skills, merits) the more this gap between linear and geometric xp costs matters. The Third Edition of Fading Suns may have so few traits, that giving out xp for equal value will just produce very similar characters.

For example, I believe Amber has more or less 5 traits, plus some other stuff.

Ultimately it STILL matters to be fair. For a low number of traits system, I would suggest a niche/role protection trait, such as "are of expertise" which acts as a bonus to some area of action, maybe a whole trait, and you get one, and only one.

So that soldier can take Fight or whatever that trait is, as their area of expertise. Whether they buy a 1, or a 5, they always have that AoE +1 to mark their focus, AND everyone else has the same power to get to a 5 in Fight in the course of the game.

@faraday I am saying neither.

I am saying that IF you want SEALs then give enough XP to create a character who performs as one. IF they want to play a green recruit, they are free to not spend those XP completely.

That green recruit may potentially NEVER be able to afford the XP for what is needed to catch up to that gamed character creation.

I acknowledge that it is easier to have simple linear cost CG points. I have provided a workaround to ensure later fairness.

The traditional approach for games that want some to be elite characters is not to say "Go ahead get the most value out of cgen, we'll tell the other PCs not to make as good of characters", it is to give the elite characters more of that thing that makes them elite: experience/character ability.

Put another way, what's to stop my green recruit from being equal to your SEAL? Same points right? Same freedom to spend the same way. This completely undermines the "in story" approach you have laid out.

In the end, the core system being equal for all, and player judgement is better, in my eyes, than some will play awesome characters and the rest are free to make impotent characters without recourse or compensation.

As a note, I have personally made, and seen played, characters who min-maxed linear cgen and then played as being less capable (not rolling all their dice), just to avoid the massive xp gap created by the bad system.

It's not about equal power.

It's about being equal as a player, having equal opportunity to succeed in game situations and so on. Systems like this massively rewards gaming cgen. It's that simple.

The player who games the system can pick up every skill the non-gaming player got in cgen, and still have all their own stuff. The reverse is not true.

However, I do not use FS3, and if I did I would immediately fix it. Why? Because I don't want to reward, or encourage, the mind set that informs that action, nor the followup version of doing it just to keep up. The game system is now forcing distracting and game play warping styles of play.

You want players to be free to not be massive experts without relegating themselves to second or third tier characters right?

It's also easier to track in the long run, you can always just add up the xp costs and verify everything. Allowing a respec is also easier.

But yes, people are free to not use or fix a game that uses such a system.

<amiable vague agreement> <comment with snarky undertones questioning @coins reasoning capacities by referring to common meme> <6 success clever word play>

edit for twitter: <amiable vague agreement> <comment with snarky undertones questioning @coins reasoning capacities by referring to common meme> <6 success cl

It is indeed majestic to watch out technological progress as measured by being able to truly investigate the theory expressed a century ago.

I think the number of players who can write as well as a harpy, who play harpies, and will create a twitter account are so few that it is unsustainable, and not worth the effort save for the novelty. I suspect that the number of other players willing to follow said twitter will number in the high single digits, though if many players use twitter no harm in adding it.

I'm not sure what you are referring to. I wasn't responding to you, just making a statement on how to make a pet less codependent. The behaviors I mention are ones that adult animals stop doing in the wild but keep as pets. Feral cats are starting to pick up a lot of it as part of the domestication process for cats. Even out in the wild.

That's all.

IC twitter stuff.

Players aren't expert writers to create that stuff.

Then don't make them codependent, based on showing adolescent behaviors to you for attention and food.

Get a timed feeder.
Do not reward cute puppy/kitten behaviors.
Let them be outside most of the time.

I don't care about roundedness, I just care that everyone has the same opportunities befor and after cgen.

And to vex @Arkandel whenever I can.

Did someone bring in their child?

As far as super powers, you could go a little broader, and use the approach many design a super-power/magic spells systems use: define the effect.

More specifically in this case, design a move or effect that would matter in +combat rolls. Then make that an optional module.