Posts made by The Sands

@roz said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

If the game itself literally describes the skills in a way that is contrary to how the game is being played, it's not a newcomer building a sheet who has made the mistake. It's whoever came up with the skill descriptions or the staff/playerbase for playing against how the skills are written to be used.

If a make itself literally describes the skills in a way that is unsupported by the mechanism then it is whoever can up with the skill description that is at fault. That is the simple case with WoD.

Now if you need to assign any blame further than that is it fair to put it on the people who realize that the description is nonsenese? Because that is exactly what is being implied. Do I feel a little bit bad with saying 'it's the newbie's fault for not realizing that what was written was wrong'? Yes, I actually do. However, if you ask me to chose between blaming them and blaming the other people who realized that what was written makes absolutely no sense then I'm going to chose the newbie.

If somewhere in the book was written the description 'the ultimate weapon known to man' for the light pistol do you blame the other players for looking at the stats and saying 'no, I'm going to chose this other gun instead'? While it is understandable how the new player made the mistake of thinking that the light pistol would be the best weapon possible they still should have looked at its stats are realized such a description simply made no sense.

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

That now means I'm now 2 dots "behind" someone else who comes along and ignores the skill descriptions and plays a driver without the Drive skill. It creates a situation that is inherently unfair between those who follow the rules and those who don't.

Wait a second. We've already established that the skill description is nonsense. This isn't a case that they aren't following the rules. This is a case of you not understanding the game system well enough to realize that something was poorly described.

In other words, it isn't that they are cheating and have gained a 2 die advantage over you. It's that you have made a mistake.

On one level, yes, it is a problem with the system that they have included these nonsense descriptors in the first place, but stop trying to say it is the fault of the player who didn't take Drive and they are somehow bad players. Sure, if they are saying that they are Professional NASCAR drivers and they haven't taken Drive because they know it will never come up in game then they are crummy RPers, but if they are just average people and they didn't take it then you shouldn't blame them because you did something wrong.

@thenomain said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

There's a reason people who take the the Crafts skill push staff to let them use it to make cool stuff, because that's why they took the bloody Crafts skill to begin with.

My character has Crafts-5, good attributes, and Professional Training with Crafts as an asset skill (along with several other related merits) and I've never 'pushed' staff to let me make cool stuff. I have actually made two swords for my character that have increased Durability and a couple of cold-iron weapons for other characters who wanted them, but I have never tried to push for anything I would consider extraordinary (I did ask at one point if I could increase the Durability of a cold iron weapon by requiring more successes but when I was told no that was it).

I took Crafts because it was appropriate for the character, not because I wanted to 'make cool things' (he's a Professor of Medieval History who is focused on medieval techniques of construction and manufacturing).

The real thing that causes min-maxing is people wanting to be 'better' than everyone else, so they search for the best way to shave points to get some kind of advantage over the other players (and while my skills might look like that's what I'm trying to do with Crafts I don't think so. Yes, I have an outrageously good roll to Craft mundane items, but if I really wanted to be 'the guy' everyone came to to make swords I would be taking merits that allow you to make better than normal weapons such as Relic Maker).

@thenomain said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

make every part of the system important

So then you want Pastry Making to be important?

That's actually a semi-serious question. The point of asking is to illustrate that you simply can't make everything important, nor do I think should you. If I want to make a character who isn't particularly good at combat I should be able to. In fact, that's the whole reason some people argue for social combat. My character should not be badly disadvantaged by the fact I didn't chose to spend points on Pastry Making. If I want to make a character who is good at combat I shouldn't be completely ineffective because I didn't take social skills. I shouldn't be any good at social activities, certainly, but I shouldn't be in the situation of 'this character is worthless' because I am not good at social.

@pyrephox said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

And yes, in most systems, you're explicitly not supposed to have people at professional or above levels of competence roll for basic tasks involving that skill unless there's some sort of extreme stress or consequences for failure - but GMs do it alllll the time, so players adapt to that.

Well, again, that's less a problem with the system (I will toss bad level descriptions onto being 'bad design', but only a minor sin) and more a problem with interpretation and escalation. First, like you said, you shouldn't even need to have to make a roll just for basic tasks, and even if you do in your normal day-to-day operations you can probably get a ton of bonuses (are you really working professionally with equipment you picked up at Walmart? There's actually a reason professional grade equipment costs more than consumer equipment. Since it is not under stressful situations should you be getting a bonus for taking your time?)

Secondly, people think you need lots of successes. No. Unless it is an extended roll (which really smooths out a bad roll) you need 1 success. Are they the greatest pastries in the world? Not today. Maybe tomorrow will be better, but you still succeeded and made 'good' pastries. However, people get use to 'Joe rolled 4 successes so unless I roll 5 successes mine sucked'.

With all that said nearly all games have breakdowns at the 'every day' level of use. Challenge Resolution Systems are geared to resolve challenging tasks and often fall apart when trying to resolve trivial tasks. This problem is so common that many systems have mechanisms so that trivial tasks aren't resolved using the game's primary CRS (one example is that in many games if your pool is far enough about a challenge you can simply take an automatic success).

@faraday For the WoD system the descriptions have always been complete nonsense. It is very easy for people to have the description 'greatest in the world' and still be worse at a task than someone with the description 'you've done this once or twice' because only half your pool comes from the skill.

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

You never have enough points to get all the things you "should" have

If that is actually the case then you are talking about poor game design. However, in my experience what you are usually looking at is more often a factor of 'poor understanding' and your example probably falls into the second group. Most games are designed around the idea that if you don't spend points on a particular skill then you are 'average' at it. Not poor or unable to do something (unless the average person would be unable to do the activity because the activity is highly specialized such as brain surgery) but just 'average'.

For instance, if I don't but Medicine then I have the 'average' level of medical skill. I can put a bandaid on someone with some neosporin if they get cut. If they get a burn I can put an ice cube on it. I don't just sit there like a complete moron without the slightest clue what to do when faced with such trivial challenges.

In other words, most games are designed around the idea that if you 'should' know how to do something you already do. You don't lack the points to buy everything you 'should' have because you've already got everything you 'should' have for free.

Now you can design a game around the idea that people need to buy even these common skills and then give them enough points to afford those skills but that's usually terrible design. You tend to not end up with well rounded characters as much as a wandering party of idiot-savants who are all world leaders in their particular talents but are unable to read or tie their shoelaces.

@tinuviel +job/deny ###=It's not the +sheet. It's the stupidity.

@thenomain That's not a concept. That's a t-shirt.

@goldfish said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

I wouldn't dare throw my dice down to MAKE someone do Thing X. That's not my style.

Then how are people screwing up your concept by saying that you can't make people do what you want simply because of your dice rolls?

@stabby During the Summer the nights are shorter than they are in Winter, but Summer nights in Miami are going to be longer than Summer nights in Fallcoast (the shortest nights in Miami are about 10 hours and 15 minutes).

@stabby said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

and all the vampires have to deal with long days and short nights.

Days in Miami aren't any longer than they are anywhere else in the world. They average 12 hours of daylight every day over a year. Being closer to the equator means you have less variation in the amount of daylight depending on the season, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, in the Winter a vampire in Fallcoast might have had 15 hours of night but during the Summer they would have only had 9.

That said, I'm still grappling with a Miami based concept myself.

@thatonedude Yeah. I'm not saying it can't be fixed. I'm just saying that that is the current fix and those are the results.

Of course turning it down to the level of Primal Urge does then lead to the early issue with some players complaining that they want their own sphere limitations loosened, but that's a whole separate ball of wax.

@catsnake The houserules as currently written only slightly ease the problems of those limitations. Supers can add their powerstat to their Willpower roll but even when you are rolling 8-9 dice and the Promethean is only rolling 3 dice you are going to lose out pretty often, and since you have to roll every single time you meet them (after the first) you're going to build up Disquiet pretty quickly (if you are rolling 9 dice to resist and the Promethean is rolling 3 dice for Disquiet you will gain a point of Disquiet about 1 time out of 6). Since you have to avoid gaining any more Disquiet for a period of weeks equal to the Promethean's Azoth in order to lower the Disquiet score it becomes pretty hard to reduce Disquiet if you are having any meaningful contact.

To put that into context, a Promethean with 3 Azoth can only meet with the character with 9 dice of resistance an average of twice a week if the person isn't going to be gaining (on average) Azoth. Twice a week doesn't really allow for much RP. And of course that's people with 9 dice. If the person doesn't have a powerstat then they better have some really good stats or else they aren't going to be able to RP much with the Promethean at all.

In a similar vein the 'fix' for Wastelands was that there was one place on the grid that Prometheans could stay at, way outside the city, where they wouldn't build Wastelands.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

And contrary to what @The-Sands has stated, I haven't really seen any 'WAH I CAN'T MAKE EVERYONE ELSE DO WHATEVER I WANT' in this thread, and if that's how this thread has been being read,

Just to be clear, I was only attributing that directly to @Goldfish. I have expressed concern that people (as in people in general, not anyone specific) might try to do something like that but until @Goldfish I don't think I ever said 'you're going to try and do this'.

Now it is entirely possible that @Goldfish was just trolling me and if so I fell for it. If not, this is the fallacy with saying I'm using a strawman argument. My argument is not 'everyone will do this' but 'if you try and implement this the end result will be someone doing this'.

In short, @Goldfish (and similar people) is why we can't have nice things.

@catsnake said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

Well now I'm sad. Promethean was the reason I gave Fallcoast a chance in the first place. Why is it being removed from the new version?

As written Promethean has massive problems with MU games. Specifically the Disquiet and the Wasteland effects do not lend themselves well. I assume the intent was to force Prometheans to be sort of 'David Banner' type characters who were always going from town to town before their Disquiet affected too many people or the Wastelands became too noticeable. Unfortunately that concept doesn't really work for a MU*.

Its an odd situation because quite honestly I don't see too much of a problem with handwaving a lot of their limitation (Wasteland effect simply doesn't exist in this game, Disquiet does not affect player characters or does not affect supernaturals) but I suppose as soon as you start doing that you'll get complaints from people playing other spheres that their supernatural limitations aren't being handwaved.

To paraphrase someone (and I don't really know who) a grid should be as large as it needs to be and no larger.

I actually find the size of the grid for Fallcoast comfortable. I wish there were things that were done to help establish some physical scale (how big a is the A02 grid, just roughly? Because if it's a single city block then yes, the city is damn small. If it's roughly 16-20 city blocks then you're probably looking at a reasonable sized city) but that's sort of a side issue. Yes, the grid squares got a little cramped with all the businesses leading off of them but already the occurrences of accidentally running into other characters on the grid wasn't very high. Spreading out to an even larger grid would have made than happen even less.

@goldfish said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Y'all just totally fucked up my WoD high social character. I'm like, What's the point? He's a good liar, persuasive, and is expressive in various ways, namely music and writing.

But why bother? I should just dump them points into combat and call it a damn day.

Hang on. Is your character suppose to be a good liar, persuasive, and expressive in various ways or is he suppose to make other players do what he wants? Because in the first case no one has done anything that said you can't do that. There's just arguments being made than you can't 'force' characters controlled by players to do something. If it's the second case the problem isn't other people fucking up your character. You fucked up your character when you made them.

Skills aren't magical abilities. They have limitations. If you want to be able to walk up to someone and slap them in the face without having them know you were there you have to buy Obfuscate, not Stealth. Likewise, if you want to control the actions of another character you need Dominate, not Persuasion.

Now if you want to propose an idea so that Persuasion can be modelled without co-opting player agency (e.g. a player who is 'persuaded' has the following modifiers) I'd like to hear it. Otherwise all I'm hearing is 'Wah! I can't make everyone else do whatever I want with my social skills!' and that makes you part of the group that makes me so nervous about ideas like 'mandatory social combat'.

@derp said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Space Cowboy might be a masochist according to your story, and he might have a deathwish. But in this scenario? His 'Masochistic Deathwish' stat just got beaten by Johnny B. Goode's 'intimidating jerkface' stat.
If you want the kind of character that never blinks in the face of such things, then -invest in the stats that make sure you rarely lose those rolls-, and then when you do lose one, figure out why this time is different.

So this is one part of my issue with how some people seem to want to handle Social Combat (and once more, there are certainly people say they don't want to handle it this way. I'm not trying to raise a strawman argument and say everyone on the 'pro' side wants this. I'm saying that there certainly are people who want Social Combat to be this way). I firmly support the idea that Space Cowboy should now be intimidated. You don't get magical resistance to intimidation just because of your backstory. I absolutely support that position.

However, context is still important and you're running on the assumption that Johnny is intimidating Space Cowboy with physical violence (since we are talking about Space Cowboy's masochistic tendancies). If Johnny had decided to threaten Space Cowboy with getting fired from his job and Space Cowboy is the owner of a starship that does odd jobs then I still support Space Cowboy laughing in Johnny's face because as intimidating as Johnny's threat is it is completely meaningless (n.b.: If Johnny was threatening he would keep Space Cowboy from getting work that's a different issue but his threat was that SC would be fired which shows to SC that Johnny doesn't have the capability of carrying out his threat because Johnny doesn't even know that SC is self employed).

Now, let's assume that Johnny is dressed like your stereotypical murder hobo and he threatens to get someone fired. This is clearly an Intimidation roll but shouldn't Johnny have penalties? After all, he doesn't seem to be particularly well off. In fact, he doesn't even look like he's got ties to the community. Sure, he's got a high intimidation skill but he still seems to be trying to use that in a way 'unsupported' by his current situation. What if Johnny's threat is that he works for the IRS (he claim he is currently off duty) and he's going to get the person audited, however the person he's threatening actually is an IRS agent (Johnny doesn't know) who knows that not only is Johnny not an IRS agent but who is also pretty unconcerned even if he did get audited?

Context has to be taken into account (incidentally, this can lead into a whole second question because if Johnny is threatening physical violence but only has a 2 Strength, 1 Brawl, 0 Weaponry and no gun and he's threatening someone with 5 Strength, 5 Brawl, and a boatload of Fighting Styles shouldn't Johnny have some situational penalties? The person being threatened is a skilled fighter who can probably tell from how Johnny holds himself that Johnny talks a good game but seems to lack the ability to back it up)