Posts made by Seraphim73

@WTFE Your description of Staff failure to follow up on a player-run plot is, in my experience, a large part of why people stopped running PrPs. However, even when Staffers have shown their willingness to follow up, there's little impetus from players to run them... again, in my experience.

I was actually trying to get to the point of--even when Staff is running active things and dragging plot-hooks galore out in front of the players, very few players can be bothered to follow-up.

All of this points towards a larger problem, however, which @WTFE brought up too. Players have been burned so many times by bad staffers, and staffers have been burned so many times by bad players, that no one trusts each other anymore. Staffers (often) put a layer of bureaucracy between players and the ability to do anything because they don't trust players to be anything but batshit crazy. Players won't put themselves out there because they're afraid of having their stories messed with.

Here's where I disagree with @WTFE on it however--I think that the sense of entitlement is very real. I've seen it staffing games and I've seen it playing games, players who basically hang around until there's a Staff-run plot, then rush toward it, and afterwards bitch about how it wasn't all about them as they go back to idling in the OOC room. A large portion of today's playerbase isn't around to tell stories, they're there to be entertained. By other people (as @saosmash mentioned).

Yes, there are still a good salting of proactive, motivated, engaged, and engaging players looking to tell cooperative stories with others--they're gold. They are what help staff turn a game from a string of encounters into a living story.

@faraday said in FS3:

So where's the disconnect? Is it documentation? Expectation? I'm just being too nitpicky?

I think what @Ganymede said -- player understanding. I might suggest something in chargen that lays that out, as well as what's on the wiki. Oh... I also wonder about swapping Proficiency to Professional? It might make it more explicit? Like, the thinking is "I'm proficient in this skill, yeah... oh, wait, you mean, could I do it for my job? Oh no, not anywhere near that good, just... proficient."

Players' need to be spoon-fed. Here's where I get out the rocking chair and my false teeth, but I remember a time when we as players came up with an idea, maybe ran it past staff and maybe didn't, and then just ran it for our friends. Or we went out and sought out Staff to follow up on hooks that they'd left in their last event. Or we did something other than sit around RPing in bars, complaining about BaRP, and waiting for the next chance to shoot/stab bad guys. Now I can't even get players to follow up on hooks shoved in their frickin' mouths (this may be my fault for coming up with bad hooks, or being a lot more subtle than I think I'm being, but I think this problem is pretty endemic and not just me).

@Ganymede said in Identifying Major Issues:

I can't even imagine how long it took for whoever to code SW:DoD or SW:FoH.

Dahan (also known as Gizka way back when). As I understand it, he created the code for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (the MUSH, not the video game, and it's been used on about a dozen Star Wars MUSHes since). He's awesome. Just wanted him to get proper props.

@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.

@kitteh I've always had a similar problem--I decide to "play it safe" and stay under the chargen max (whatever the Staff has decided that to be) because I don't want to be too twinky, and then my "specialist" is objectively worse (not a whole lot worse, given that it's usually 1-2 dice, but still worse) than other specialists because I didn't min-max at the game's start. And because of the linear costs in Chargen and accelerating costs with XP, it's very difficult to catch up. It still happens to me, and I've started just telling myself "it's just one or two dice, it's not the end of the world," which helps a little and is true, but there's often just that little annoyance still there.

One more thing that I really, really like about FS3 that helps with this is that sheets are visible by default, so you can always look at the sheets of those who are already doing the role that you're looking at, and see what level their skills are at. Of course, this doesn't help if you're one of the first to chargen, but if you join in later it's nice.

@faraday said in FS3:

Actually in 3rd Ed melee combat defends with the melee weapon skill of the defender.

Wonderful! I think that this was my number one complaint with FS3 (that you were even slightly likely to change). Between that, variable armor, and 'open' vehicles, it's suddenly much, much easier to make a fantasy game with FS3 3.0. I tend to agree on weapon skills though, back on t5W, we used Blades, Bludgeons, and Spears.

@Thenomain said in FS3:

I fucking love 1-3, but I love low fantasy.

I'm totally down for levels 1-3 so long as the expectation is schlubs. If the point of the game is "can I survive long enough to not suck at everything but my one trick," then I'm good with that. Most of the low-level games that I've played in have basically treated levels 1-5ish as painful prerequisites to epic fantasy. I totally understand that that is my own experience with the GMs that I've had, but... eh. Unless I knew the GM was going to be playing an "gritty, tense, survival" sort of low-level game, I probably wouldn't be particularly interested... or I'd see those levels as the painful prerequisites to an actual character with options.

@Lotherio I love the idea of using vehicles as units. Very creative. I think the reason so many people say that FS3 isn't really great for Fantasy is that its focus is on ranged combat rather than melee combat. The inability to have your defense skill based on the weapon you're wielding is a pretty heavy downside for balanced melee combat (unless you only have a single Melee skill, like most Sci-Fi uses of FS3 do, along with every (I think) FS3 game that @faraday has run).

You end up with not-quite-satisfactory solutions such as a Defense skill (@faraday hates this one in particular, I know) or having your weapon skill count as your ability to defend against that weapon as well as to attack with it (which is clumsy and hard for people to wrap their heads around), or just having a single melee skill for all weapons (nice and simple, but... really simple).

Combat magic works fine, it's just those magical applications that don't directly deal damage that are more complicated to work out (they can be done, they just require a bunch of passing and oversight by the GM).

On another topic, it's important to remember that in combat, you're not (as far as I recall) rolling against another skill, you're rolling against a set defense number, so the probabilities in the chart work for versus rolls, but not for combat (although the Skill X vs 3 line works neatly for combat).

@WTFE said in FS3:

Apparently I was playing earlier versions of the game that were more prone to failures.
Nope. I am reporting on my experiences with the FS3 system and why it is that "we use FS3" is a mark against a game as a result.

So you're complaining about a past version of the game, based on your perception on a situation where (I think) we all admit that our perceptions are biased to remember failures over successes, and you don't think that you might be protesting too much? Really?

@faraday said in FS3:

I hate starting off at level 1 when my friends twist my arm into playing D20.

Well they're just doing it wrong, unless they like playing schlubs. I've always found level 1-3 to be pretty dang boring, you generally have one "trick," and everything hangs on a knife's edge because you have relatively tiny amounts of HP.

@faraday said in FS3:

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.

This comes up because people remember the times when their characters sucked due to RNG and it made them angry far, far, far longer than they remember the times when their characters were awesome as expected. Just how a lot of humans are wired. I still remember some epic failures from... more than a decade ago. Maybe even decadeS.

A scene that would take 6-8 hours on a Saga Edition or WoD game (pretty standard tough but not exceptional fight) will usually take 2-3 hours in FS3 because all the rolls are done behind the curtain. It's delightful.

And, because I'm insane, it means that I can run huge combat scenes in FS3 that would normally take days in Saga/WoD, and they take 4-5 hours in FS3. I adore huge, swirling battles, so this makes me gleefully happy.

@WTFE said in FS3:

I don't mind failed rolls or even failed scenes if the opposition warrants it. Hell, failure leads to more future fun typically! But when you come across as the rainbow butt monkey of the group--and when this happens enough times that it becomes a bad running gag like a late-'90s SNL sketch--when all the numbers say you're a competent professional it's really damned off-putting.

Completely agree on this, actually. It's one of the most frustrating experiences for me (and it appears you, and I would bet others as well) when a character specifically built for something fails at it repeatedly on-screen. Often, however, it's just the RNG being an asshole, and it just feels like it's happening all the time. It doesn't make it feel any better, of course.

@faraday said in FS3:

What I don't get is people acting like it's some kind of failure-ridden abomination when the math says otherwise.

I really, really don't think anyone is saying that (maybe @WTFE is, but I don't think that even he is). There has been some criticism in this thread and others--most of which is difference of vision (someone sees something as a problem while you see it as working as intended) or simply bad experiences with dice--but there's a ton of stuff right with FS3--and even more with 3rd Edition.

@faraday said in FS3:

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.

Yeah, nothing is going to fix bad Staffers. Nothing. Ever. I mean, I get that some people are like "I have the skill, I want to roll it," but really... some things should just be auto-successes at a given level (do you remember to order food and drink for the party with your Administration 6?).

@WTFE In my own system, I did something similar to the autosuccess mechanic you mentioned. When your character is unhurt, not suffering some negative circumstance, and not trying anything tricky (ie, they have the lowest possible target number for their roll), they can trade dice for successes (4:1 trade instead of the 50% odds for each dice when rolling at the lowest possible target number). This means that someone with a Professional rating can trade dice for a simple Success without a chance of failure (on a simple task), or they can roll and hope they roll with the odds and get two successes.

Even for an expert with a 10 skill can only trade for 2 successes, so they're not likely to actually wound someone with 4 dice rolling against them, but they'll nail an inner ring (but not the bullseye) every single time.

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.

Yeah, @faraday and I talked about how it would be great not to go right back to Canceron, but it would be kind of a waste to "use up" another Colony on a mini-campaign instead of a full one. It wasn't ideal, but it was definitely better than the alternative.

For some idea about how quick @faraday is at implementing change, Ares (FS3 3.0) now has combat/distract and a difference between X Evades and X Evades Easily.

@faraday said in FS3:

@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.

WOO! I can nerd it up to my heart's content! (I actually love it mostly for exactly the reason @kitteh was getting at earlier, to know if I'm rolling crappily, my opponent is rolling well, or who is outclassed if anyone is).

I misspoke earlier. Suppression/stress doesn't make it easier to hit the target. But maybe it should. Will ponder.

It might complicate matters, but it would be nice to be able to make enemies easier for others to hit. Whether this would be an integral part of suppression (maybe Suppression but not Stress, so only with the Suppress action?) or another action altogether doesn't much matter to me -- I suppose I have a slight preference to it being a separate action, because that allows more options in combat, but it -would- be nice for ECOs be able to help their pilots hit their targets more easily (since that seemed to be the main purpose of Raptors in the miniseries at least -- guiding Vipers to their targets).

@Thenomain Actually, in the version of FS3 before Ares, there was a -delightful- thing called +combat/log. I loved that thing more than I can say. It showed all of the dice rolls behind +combat. Yes, it's great for debugging, but it's also great for balancing weapon stats, and for nerds like myself (and apparently kitteh) who like to see the -why- of something happened, not just -what- happened.

@faraday Oh! I didn't know that Suppression made targets easier for others to hit too. Dang, I'll probably use it more often now.

@kitteh The Suppress action that Raptor ECM does (or people can do instead of attacking with "regular" weapons) adds lots of suppression to your target (based on your roll and their defense), but from what I recall of the system, every ranged attack adds 1 suppression point to the target.

@kitteh Definitely not coming off right, because I'm not intending to be condescending. I apologize for giving that impression.

I'm definitely not trying to talk down to others or suggest that they're doing something the wrong way, and while I have in the past hunted kill count (and readily admit it), I stopped doing that after Van made ace. Even when I was hunting kill count intently, however, I didn't do so to the exclusion of what made sense ICly. Either way, I'm definitely not trying to brag, and apologize for communicating poorly if it came off as such. I was trying to suggest that there are other ways to kill-chase than to attack a single target.

I was also noting that I also thought that some way to explicitly benefit element pairs would be nice (besides the suppression/quicker killing benefits Faraday mentioned), but that after some discussion, I had come around to Faraday's view that it wouldn't be used as often as I had originally though.

I'm really not trying to argue any point, I don't think, just mentioning some different possibilities (for instance, a way to view situations when two fighters are attacking one another in +combat).

Again, I apologize if I came off antagonistic or condescending in doing so, it was not my intention.

@kitteh said in FS3:

@Seraphim73 I don't think most people are 'ignoring' things shooting them, so much as we're trying to RP the realistic shape of a dogfight. It actually makes a lot more sense to be shooting something that isn't shooting you (because that requires you playing chicken, basically) and instead shoot something that's shooting someone else

If each round was just one instant, yeah. But I don't have a problem with two fighters basically 'dueling' in the sky, trying to each jockey for firing position. That works visually, at least in my head. Also, remember that (in space at least) Vipers can literally flip end-for-end and keep going while firing at someone who was behind them.

I... granted... have a biased view of the killboard, but I can guarantee you that it's not just stats. There are plenty of pilots with higher stats than Van's. Most of it's really luck and just how targets work out... given that kills are only scored if you're the only one who hits a target the turn its taken out. Honestly, unless everyone else just flew around and watched the dogfight, taking out Big Bads would generally be the same (especially Big Bads without the sort of work-up that Scar got in the show).

I love to see pilots calling out to each other during a fight, talking tactics, asking for help, offering help, all of that. It's great. I wish more of it happened on the ground too. I would also (and this is going to come back to bite me) love to see one or more Scar-style enemies start popping up in the story. Someone we know going into the fight is an ace enemy pilot, because they have a fighter that is somehow distinctive and they've been wrecking allied pilots (or us) previously.

But we've wandered a ways afield from system discussion. Oh well, welcome to MSB.

@kitteh Actually, Van's gotten most of his kills by picking off enemies who were targeting other PCs. Those PCs were ignoring them even as they shot at the PCs, so Van picked them off. So while there may not be explicit mechanical bonuses to working as a wingman (or with one), it certainly helps your kill-count. And, as Fara said, concentrating fire wipes out enemies faster, which makes it less likely that they'll be able to hit you.

I suggested an Aid Another action in +combat to Fara once (give up your turn to provide a +3 to an ally's attack--suppression already does the opposite, penalizing an enemy's attack), but she noted that she thought very few people would use it. After some thought, I agreed with her. There aren't many people who would give up a turn to boost someone else's attack until the very end, when it was 1-2 enemies against a mass of friendlies, and at that point you're just feeding kills to people anyhow.

I think it would be interesting to call out any enemies who are at the Boss-level in poses, but only if they're being obvious about how they're flying. I could totally see (especially in Cylons) that they wouldn't be so obviously better as the ones who are always just half a step ahead of the poor organics. In my mind, better Cylons wouldn't show off the way some human aces do, they'd just kill Colonials better (or get not-killed by Colonials better). Sometimes that would be obvious, other times it wouldn't.

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.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

One possible variation that would help with the balance between dinosaur and newbie characters

The issue that some people have (and that isn't an issue for Fara) isn't about dinosaurs versus newbies. In fact, I've seen games where the first wave of people to come in have "sane" stats, and then the next wave, people who don't know the game creator, come in min-maxed and outpace the original group, despite the original group's XP head start.

@TimmyZ I believe that Luck is +3 base, but yes, spending Luck really does help -- as long as the other guy doesn't spend Luck too.

As for the grizzled vet vs prodigy in sports... it depends on the sport. If you look at American football, for instance, the best players at a few positions (running back, flanker, outside linebacker, cornerback) tend to be younger players because they need super-fast-twitch reflexes. But the best quarterbacks? Barring a few true prodigies, the best quarterbacks (and offensive linemen, middle linebackers, safeties, slot receivers, and several other positions) are those who are still young enough to have quality reflexes, but who have put in several years at the pro level to learn the tricks of the trade.

It sounds like Conner McDavid is one of those prodigies (Russell Wilson would be my football example, but I'm a Seahawks fan) whose work ethic matches the veterans and who is also young enough that their reflexes are in better shape than the canny vets.

@kitteh Your ability to hit in combat can also depend wildly on what skill enemy your targeting (and the other PCs are targeting). Since we don't know how good the enemies are even after we attack them (they may have just rolled poorly/well) that's pretty much a crapshoot. (And I see that Fara already addressed this... whoops... that's what I get for typing up something so long.) It can indeed be very frustrating to see miss-miss-miss all through a combat... I totally agree. Sometimes (if it makes sense ICly) if I'm having a rough time of it, I'll switch off to a damaged enemy, just to get a danged hit.

@faraday said in FS3:

I don't disagree, but this is simply not something I see as a problem needing to be solved.

Yup! I completely understand, accept, and have no problem with the fact that this is a design choice that you made. Again, I'm not addressing it as something that needs to be changed, just talking from a theoretical game design standpoint of how it -could- be changed, because I'm a game design nerd.

@faraday said in FS3:

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.

Yup. I wasn't actually suggesting that you do make the change, because based on our conversations, I know that you don't see the difference as a problem with the system. Totally fine with that, it's your system, and it's one that I like to use. Just noting that there -is- a solution for those who think that it's a problem (from a game-design perspective, a game-runner actually making that change, as I noted, would have a ton of work to do).

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.

This is something that I think sometimes doesn't get emphasized enough, and sometimes gets emphasized too much. I think it bears repeating that FS3 is NOT designed for PvP games, because a lot of people forget that when they're looking at the "unbalance" in chargen versus XP or whatever else might be bugging them at the moment. I'm guilty of that myself. And there's enough randomness in 2.0 that a dice pool of 14 isn't that much better than a dice pool of 11 (lowering the target number for successes made results a little more predictable, but as recent events on BSU showed, not all that more predictable).

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 try not to, and usually succeed, Van has an Expert Piloting and a Great Gunnery--there are certainly people with higher numbers in both of those skills). I think it's important edited to add: to know that even if characters aren't directly pitting their skills against one another (outside of friendly competition), they'll be comparing their skills, and some people will be disappointed when others come out of chargen with higher skills and they can't catch up to those folks.

Then again, that's part of FS3--skills take time to increase, and not everyone starts out at the same place... it's built as a closer reflection to reality (or at least Hollywood reality) than a game where absolute balance is king, and that's by design.