Posts made by The Sands

Another property where I love the concept but I'm not a huge fan of the system; the Strange.

@Jennkryst said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Bobotron said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Jennkryst
Flying sims/space systems are awful. Just let people pose and give them a good combat system with options.

Flying sims give me shit to do when I'm bored, but too exhausted from work to actually RP. A mindless sort of grind to advance the character in some small way, but nothing TAXING.
Eclipse Phase, by no means, would require it to travel places, because Farcasting is commonplace. But some folks might want to do trader bullshit (raises a hand), and fly boats places in a space cowboy fashion.

Cargo ships aren't a very big thing in Eclipse Phase because of how pervasive nanotechnology is. Even in the inner system if you were on Mars and you wanted to buy a designer dress 'from Luna' you would end up purchasing a limited use blueprint for the dress and then fabricating (or paying to have the dress fabricated) on Mars.

It should also be noted that you would probably be noted that you would find flying a ship in Eclipse Phase to be extremely dull. If you look at the engine tables most of the engines have what we would feel to be extremely low thrust. Most ships accelerate at about .01 Gs. If you have some wealthy players they might have a ship capable of .05 Gs of acceleration, and in space your engine thrust is the maximum G forces you will ever experience (unless you run into something). Combat aircraft do these really cool 6-8 G maneuvers while their engines are only capable of around 1G of thrust, but that's because they are in an atmosphere.

That's not to say that there are no ships travelling around. There are lots and a character or group of characters could certainly have a ship and have adventures around it. However, it is going to probably be a bit more along the lines of being something between a long haul trucker and an airliner pilot.

(Incidentally, if you are interested in getting a rough feel for what flying a ship in EP might be like download Orbiter. It is fascinating stuff but probably not what you are really expecting it to be)

I'll throw in my vote for Eclipse Phase. I would dearly love for someone to put together a good EP mux or mush. Not necessarily they exact ruleset but the general setting with transhumanism, nanofabrication, the Titans, and the Pandora Gates. There are certainly some issues that straddle setting/ruleset that would probably need some tweaking such as nanofabrication and blueprints but the setting is really solid.

In a similar vein I would probably throw in Cthulhutech. Again, don't really like the rules but the setting looks like a lot of fun. With giant mecha, guyver-like tagers, sorcerors and the Nazaddi there's pretty much something for everyone.

The last one I would really love to see would be a pseudo-John Carter of Mars setting. I say 'pseudo' because by diverging from the source material you are freed up to allow more humans to be running around. You can throw in native races with sorcerous abilities, create floating pirate cities, and generally go nuts while keeping the feel of the original stories.

@ThatGuyThere Actually, the average number of successes for someone rolling 9 dice 4 times is around 15 because of exploding contributing more than you think (http://anydice.com/program/bd0a. Thanks to Misadventure for pointing me to the site).

And while things like 9-again may not contribute too much to a roll by the time all is said and done they contribute a great deal more than you might think. After all, someone with 6 points in combined skill and attribute will roll 54 dice (assuming a +3 equipment bonus) so at the end of the day an extra 10% here and an extra 5% there adds up to a lot of successes.

But the real point of this thread wasn't to quibble about how much ability A helps or how many extra successes ability B will generate. It's just to figure out what the theoretical pools (and any roll modifiers) should be.

At present I think I'm more or less in line with your estimates. I'm actually ranging from 4-8 dice with the 4 dice being the skill level of your average entry level professional. These are the guys on the construction crew that do the real simple jobs. You have them handle the framing and drywall when the job is easy but in the spots where those tasks get tricky you have someone who's been doing the job for a couple of years now come in and handle it. 6 dice are your true 'average professionals' who are fully trained. They've been doing the job and 95% of the time if you want the job done you call these guys in. 8 dice are the true experts. Not necessarily world-leaders in their field but they are they guys who get called in to do jobs that even your normal professional would consider to be difficult.

Then what I did was I figured out the average number of successes for 1 to 6 rolls as an extended action using a rote action for 7 dice, 9 dice, and 11 dice. I assume that the vast number of extended roll activities your average professional does are rote actions. Sure, the tailor needs to modify the pattern for the custom fit jacket they are making and everyone's body if a slightly different shape but they've done so many jacket alterations, plus they have the time to sit down and work out any tricky areas that might exist, that it is still a rote action for them.

Then I figured out how many rolls you would expect someone normally doing that job to take. If your 'average professional' would take 1-2 rolls I used the average number of successes for 7 dice because the average person doing that job is a bit less skilled. If it was 3-4 rolls I used the average successes for 9 dice and if it was 5-6 rolls I used the average number of successes for 11 dice.

This seemed to work really well because the guys with the 4 die pool could nearly always accomplish the '2 roll' task (99.96% of the time). It might take them twice as long to get it done (because they had to make four rolls) but they would nearly always be able to, much like you would expect in real life. Meanwhile the odds of that person pulling off a '3 roll' tasks is about 50/50 (meaning that they were around 75% likely to succeed if they took 3 times as long as the 'fully trained' professional. Meanwhile the 'fully trained' pro with their 9 die pool would nearly always accomplish a '4 roll' task (99.21% of the time) but dropped to around 50% odds of succeeded at a '5 roll' task.

So I was trying to figure out the number of successes required to do certain jobs in the WoD/GMC as well as the length of time for each roll and I came up with the idea of trying to use some real life estimates to generate those numbers. To do this I start by figuring out the number of rolls that a 'professional' would need on average to complete the job as well as the average length of the job.

As an easy example, if something takes an average of 4 rolls and an average of 4 days then each roll takes one day.

Now the problem that comes is this; just what is the roll for this theoretical 'professional NPC' that is used to generate these baselines? Does our baseline NPC have 5 dice (assuming a 2 and a 3 in attributes and skills)? 6 dice because of a specialty? 7 dice because their base stats should total to 6 plus a specialty? 9 because we can assume that the baseline professional has access to equipment giving them a +3 bonus? And what about things like having 9-again from Professional Training-2? Should the roll be considered a rote action since professionals usually do highly similar activities over and over again?

I've already got some ideas for these (and I'll throw them out later) but I'm curious about what other people think are good rolls for a theoretical baseline professional.

Twin Peaks: The Return. It's like going to your 25th annual class reunion and meeting that incredibly bizarre person that you haven't thought about since graduation and finding out that they are as strange as ever, but in a good, happy and healthy kind of way (and I realize most of us probably -are- that incredibly bizarre person for a lot of our classmates).

@Thenomain said in CofD and Professional Training:

The Storytelling system is broken in certain precise circumstances. News at 11.

Are those certain precise circumstances days ending in 'y'?

And while that may sound snarky I still play it. I learned long ago that a game is largely what you make out of it. Yes, you can decide that because you bought 'academics' you are equally comfortable speaking about ancient Etruscan poetry, corporate finance law, and chemistry since the rules allow that or you could voluntarily limit yourself (at which point maybe you are still equally comfortable with all those for some actual reason beyond the rules but you happen to suck at math).

Usually I try and limit myself but right now I'm playing a wizened changeling who tends to mostly stick with blacksmithing but who is still pretty comfortable with making shields (contrary to what Captain America teaches us most shields are made out of wood), working with kevlar, wood, leather, and doing automotive repair because he's a magical freaking creature (although at present if you were to ask him to make a bomb he would tell you he doesn't have a clue how to do so, even though that's crafts as well according to some people).

Yeah, sometimes it hacks me off when I run across someone who's character seems to have a Ph.D. in Science, but that's they're problem and not mine.

@ArmedCarp said in State of Things:

@Three-Eyed-Crow Hold up... there are Indians, honest to God ones from India, living on Indian reservations in America, like Native Americans?

No (well, maybe a few but not enough to be statistically significant in any sense) but what happens is that that image occurs in both locations.

@Ganymede Missing on an 85% isn't that big a surprise. You should still be missing about 1 in 6.

@faraday said in FS3:

Even when I switched it to a dice-based mechanic, people were still skeptical about it until I showed them the dang die roll. And even now, we've seen some folks requesting that same degree of transparency in the combat rolls. You can't do that if the system is stats-based.

Sure you can.
Person A (CV:8.5) attacks Person B (CV:2.5) and hits (Target 75%/Rolled 42%).

In fact in some ways it might even be clearer to the people playing. While they might not understand exactly how 75% came about (though that can be pretty easily explained) the fact that they are given a clear percentage chance for success would probably offset some of the situations where people think that because they've got 11 dice and the other person has 9 their odds of success should be around 80% when it is actually only about 70%.

This doesn't mean people would automatically accept such a system. I completely understand people's bias to feeling a clump of dice somehow represents the odds better. I'm just saying that you can definitely provide a lot of transparency to the combat rolls.

@Thenomain The thing, though, is that RPGs been developed by a single person in a pretty long time. Heck, even games like Dungeons and Dragons weren't actually developed by one person. Now in the case of things like FS3 where it's a labor of love I can understand the designers not getting the chance to get someone good with probability math to work on things. When you had books being written in the late 90's by teams of people and making significant amounts of money (sadly, these days we are back to where game designers often need to hold other jobs just to make a living) I always wished the larger companies would invest in just one or two people with a good math background.

@Thenomain You're not wrong there. Sometimes it just drives me crazy that game designers pay so little attention to their math.

So I dug down a little bit more into the probabilities of FS3 and found something that I think exemplifies what happens when you design a challenge resolution system using a semi-arbitrary 'this sort of feels good' mechanism.

Before I go on I would like the say that I still feel that the probabilities in FS3 work out pretty well and my comment about how it is designed isn't meant to come off as dismissive. It is just that at the moment I've been grinding through some math and my language centers are a little out of whack so I can't think of a better term to use that would be a clear and concise summary for how the probability system was derived without making it so that some people might perceive me as being dismissive.

The flaw I've spotted is essentially one of 'countering modifiers'. To explain the term in most games if you take an action to get a +1 to attack and then someone takes an action that gives them a +1 to defense then you end up back where you started. They take some form of action that counters your modifier (although usually in doing so they have to take some other form of penalty themselves).

In FS3 this doesn't happen. If you've got 6 dice to attack someone and you attack a person with 6 dice to defend then your chance of hitting is 61.69%. If both people get a 3 die boost (from spending Luck) the odds drop to 59.60%. So even though relative positions remain completely the same (both people are equally skillful, both people catch lucky breaks) the attacker loses 2% on their possibility to hit. While this isn't a whole lot it is still awkward and this is compounded by the fact that it isn't a consistent change. If both people only have 2 dice to begin with the odds shift from 69.60% to 62.76%, nearly a 7% change. Even more inconsistent if someone with 2 dice attacks someone with 6 dice they go from a 23.56% chance to hit to a 29.25% chance to hit, so they in fact gained nearly 6%.

Now again, I'm really not trying to say that FS3 is a horrible system or anything. Honestly, if I didn't think you were looking for data like this and you weren't able to use it constructively (and in this case 'constructive' even includes saying 'you know what? I -like- that this happens') I wouldn't bother. Kind of how we were talking earlier about aspects of realism and different people having different thresholds people will interpret these 'hiccups' differently. I'm just making sure you know they are there.

Now in a tabletop game I would be a lot more accepting of these small aberrations in the probability curves. It's more important to keep things moving along quickly and so you want to avoid complex calculations. That means there's lots of mechanisms that get used to generate probability curves and character progression schemes that are 'good enough'.

We're not playing on a tabletop, however and a lot of the things that would give us a headache the computer can handle very, very easily. As an example I would never try to play a game in which I'm told that the odds of success are 1/(1+2.718281828^((level difference)*-0.183102))*100. I mean what the Hell is that? On the other hand having the computer look at the two characters and say 'Oh! There's a 6 level difference. That means the odds of success is 75%' is something a computer is -really- good at doing. Computers are so good at it that they don't even need to round the result to 75% but can actually have the 'real' probability of 74.99999458% because they don't need to roll 2 10-sided dice to generate a probability.

Even better than that, because you are using mathematics to calculate probabilities you can avoid another pitfall that is left over from tabletop games; the Hell a character goes through to increase a skill they are really good at. You're a Great pilot and you want to increase your skill another point? That's going to take you 3 months during which absolutely nothing changes because you can't roll 2/3 of an 8-sided die. Using math, however, there's not anything wrong with being partway between Great and Expert. The computer has no more difficulty calculating the chance of success between characters of equal level and characters who are 2.1 levels apart.

Now in a lot of settings players might have some difficulty wrapping their heads around some of these aspects and I can completely understand that. One of the nice things about FS3, however, is that a lot of these mechanics are already hidden under the hood and you could change the system with the players barely noticing. Just allow the players to put XP straight into a stat like Pilot. If they put 4 or 5 XP in the skill they get feedback on their sheet that shows that their skill is 'Fair'. As soon as they add the 6th point of XP to Pilot the stat now reads 'Good'. However, a pilot who has put in 5 XP has a small advantage over a pilot who puts in 4 XP. When they shoot the computer looks at their stats, compares them to the stat of the defender, and tells them whether they hit or not. Practically nothing has changed for them (and that's assuming you let them buy partial levels. While I'm all in favor of that it is hardly a requirement. It's an advantage of the system buy hardly mandated).

The biggest problem you would have with such a system is dialing in the initial values. I actually had created a spreadsheet a few years back that did the math for me so I could concentrate on shaping the curve however I wanted.

I've gone ahead and cleaned it up and added some stuff that allow you to sort of 'mock up' tests using attributes that are roughly the same scale as what FS3 is doing. I did make one cheat, however, in the mockup and rather than using the XP chart that FS3 uses I change the calculations for the levels of skills and attributes to a pair of formulas.

@ThatOneDude said in CofD and Professional Training:

When games have no PK, why does PT benefits matter? Everything at that point is just story/RP. Why is it a bad thing if a PC that has a back story as a soldier is able to roll 9-again with any firearm (due to year and years of training and experience) and then if he really focuses on the shot, he can do exceptionally well (rote)? What does it hurt other than furthering the story?

Why make the person roll at all in such a case? Why not say he just hits? Or give him an extra 10 dice because he was a solider?

And no, I don't actually think what you were asking was a bad question and I'm just giving you a snarky answer. I'm using what is called Reductio ad Absurdum which is a method for illustrating a logical flaw by carrying it to an extreme conclusion. In essence it matters because combat is a significant part of any game. Giving significant bonuses in combat for extremely low prices, even if that combat does not ever occur between PCs, is unbalancing.

Now I'm not going to debate whether or not the bonuses from PT are significant or not since everyone's mileage may vary but I will point out that the argument is being made that as the rules sit it is practically a requirement which would seem to prove that the bonuses are significant.

But what about allowing those bonuses for non-combat skills? Well, I don't think anyone would argue that a game becomes imbalanced because someone is able to sing really well or paint very nice pictures. Even in the case of skills likes Athletics the fact that a character has a significant advantage in climbing might help someone really shine during a 'Cliffhanger' storyline but unless your entire campaign is going to be based around a Sylvester Stallone movie the bonus probably isn't going to unbalance anything.

@faraday XP progression is nearly always problematic and may, in fact, be one of the most substantial problems game designers face. In short you are trying to balance the opposing forces of 'feeling of accomplishment' on the part of the dinos with 'feeling of contribution' on the part of the new players. If you make it so that it is easy for new players to catch up to the older players you seriously undercut the old player's feelings of achievement while if you make it too difficult for new players to catch up to the old players you end up with the new players feeling as though they are just cannon fodder. Balancing this is made trickier because not everyone agrees where the proper balance between the two is.

This is one of the reasons why I like a geometric progression chart with a more or less linear comparison. Just as a quick and dirty example I'll go back to my earlier example where a task is resolved by rolling 3d6 with a target of 11 or less, modified up or down by 1 point per different in level between competitors. If each level of the skill takes twice as long as the previous level then it would only take about 3 months for a brand new character to get to within 2 levels of a 1 year old character. With 3d6 you're still at a significant disadvantage but you are at least not ridiculously outclassed and personally I feel like if you have trouble that someone who has spent a solid year working on something has that much of an advantage over someone who has only spent 3 months you're probably skewing a little bit more to hurrying people up than I like.

This is just a super quick-and-dirty example as well. I suspect that after some work and balancing I would probably use 4d6 with a target of 14 which would make 2 levels of difference a little less significant. I might also use a scale of each level taking 2.5 or 3 times as long (to be completely honest I might be tempted to do something even more complex mathematically which would allow for fractional points, but as a quick example this works pretty well). Also the fact that characters wouldn't start from 0 means the difference in the brand new character and the one year veteran would be far closer.

@faraday Yeah. Running samples and looking at the data is the 'Monte Carlo' method for generating probability curves. It's good for a quick and dirty way to draw your image but occasionally you'll get hiccups like that. However, calculating the exact probabilities can be a massive headache. I'm just lucky because I've got a really good head for probability mathematics.

@Arkandel Crossing my fingers on that. I keep telling myself I'm not a Marvel fanboy and that I -want- the DC movies to be good. Unfortunately Suicide Squad has been the only one where I thought the previews looked good (before WonderWoman's) and it was only barely watchable.

I do like the WW previews however. I just hope it lives up to them.

@faraday Running the probabilities it looks like you are using Monte Carlo method for calculating distribution. I went ahead and did the math and you can get the exact mathematical probabilities here..

It appears that the spike I saw at 8v8 was simply a statistical anomaly and not part of the actual probability curve though I still stand by my statement that the probability deltas are still just a little off, IMO (but again, this isn't a horrible thing. It is far better than you will see in a lot of other systems).

@faraday said in FS3:

@The-Sands I think the dots are misleading you though because a 7-vs-7 is better than 8-vs-8 and 8-vs-8 is better than 9-vs-9. Basically the higher you are the better you are at dodging, so the attacker has a lower chance of success. I can see where you might want same-vs-same to work differently, but it is at least internally consistent. I'm fine with how it is.

That's what I said by 'handwaving a little' to explain why the curve doesn't work the way I suggested it should. You can argue that you get better at dodging faster than you get better at targeting. However the real thing is that there is not a complete internal consistency. While XvX tends to decrease as X gets higher when you go from 7v7 to 8v8 that doesn't happen. At that point the odds increase, then when you go to 9v9 they decrease once more.

Again, this isn't a huge spike or anything, but the chart at least does show it occurring. Out of curiosity are these odds calculated odds or did you use Monte Carlo for determining them?

@faraday Looking at your chart one irregularity would appear to be people of equal skill. The person with a skill of 1 shooting at a person with a skill of 1 has around an 80% chance to hit while a person with a skill of 12 shooting at a person with a skill of 12 has only about a 60% chance of hitting.

This is probably backwards since at very low levels a person with poor skill has more difficulty hitting a stationary target. At the higher end of skills you have a greater tendency toward 'the quick and the dead' where it is a big deal with who gets off the first shot.

However, even if we handwave a little bit to explain why the curve works the way it does you get a weird 'bump' at 8 where the odds are higher of an 8 hitting an 8 than a 7 hitting a 7 or a 9 hitting a 9.

Also, the shapes of the curves is a bit off. If you track simply the curve for the person with 1 die the change in probability seems to decrease at each step (draw a line between the dot for 1 to 1 and for 1 to 2 and you will see that 1 to 3 is above it. Likewise a line between 1 to 2 and 1 to 3 will have 1 to 4 above it).On the other hand the curve for someone with 12 dice seems to increase the change between each step. If you draw similar lines you will see that the subsequent points always fall below those lines.

This isn't meant to say that your probability curves are horrible or anything. Just that there are mathematical oddities that creep in there.