Posts made by The Sands

@faraday Actually, 2d6 isn't really a bell curve. It's a pyramid shape. While the odds of 7 are higher than anything else because there are so few dice involved it is much more 'swingy' than 3d6 (Traveller, incidentally, used 2d6).

The thing with the 'many dice' systems is that they aren't real bell curves and they have some terribly awkward spots. As an example lets just assume you have a range between 1 and 8 dice. Someone with 3 dice has a massive advantage over someone with 1. On the other hand someone with 8 dice only has a minor advantage over someone with 6. Considering how in many systems (FS3 included, I believe) it takes a huge effort to get those extra 2 dice at the end that creates a sort of imbalance in the curve.

@faraday said in FS3:

Millenium's End was actually the most realistic RPG combat system I've seen. You missed an awful lot, but one shot had a good chance of taking you out. They had rules for bleeding and critical hits and all sorts of other realistic wound stuff. Hit location was a nifty silhouette system that varied the hitloc based on the position of your target. It was a work of art.

My tabletop buddies played it twice, declared: "This system is no fun at all." and never looked back I can't say they were wrong.

Someone mentioned CORPS earlier. The company that created CORPS had a system before that was never really named but which was used by games such Spacetime that pretty much broke me out of my own desire to find more and more realistic game systems and our situation was pretty much the same. We never really played it. Instead we spent time making up a couple of characters and ran a couple of mock combats before realizing that the system, while highly realistic, was very slow, resulted in combat that didn't feel very fun because the odds to hit someone substantially seemed pretty low, but then once a character was solidly hit they went down like a sack of potatoes and were out of action for weeks.

Incidentally the company's name is Blacksburg Tactical Research Center and they are one of those groups who got their hands on data from state and local agencies and who were really committed to trying to make combat work as realistically as possible.

@faraday said in FS3:

I just don’t know how to fix that with dice. Dice will always be random - that's what they're for. If you look at the combats on BSGU, one could argue I’ve tuned it too much in the direction of being a cakewalk. 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.

Personally, what I would look at is some sort of bell curve system. It's actually one of my favorite parts of the design in the Hero Games system. In that system whenever you try to succeed in a task (what I term 'challenge resolution' when talking about general game design) you roll 3d6 and just add the results up. In the case of combat results you want to roll 11 or less which is then modified by the difference in combat values. That sounds more complex than it actually is. If a person has an offensive combat value of 8 and they shoot at someone with a defensive combat value of 6 they need a 13 or less. If someone with an offensive combat value of 6 shoots at someone with a defensive combat value of 8 they need a 9 or less. This means they guy with the better skill will pretty reliably hit the guy with the lower skill (about 84% of the time) while the guy with the lower skill really needs to get a lucky shot (they only hit 37.5% of the time).

That's a direct one on one slugfest, however. You can get plenty of additional complications such as one person dodging (which means they cannot attack but they get an additional three points to their defensive combat value). HGS does do something that, I think, show's its age a little in that while combat is done through a single roll to hit where stats are compared other actions are handled as skill-vs-skill rolls in which you see who has a larger margin of success (as a quick example a person with stealth at 14 or less who rolls and gets an 11 will sneak past someone with a perception score of 12 or less who rolls a 10 since they succeeded by 3 points while the guard only succeeds by 2). Personally I would probably either do all opposed challenges as skill-vs-skill (so offensive skill vs. defensive skill) or else I would make all contested actions a single roll where the stats are compared (so the person with stealth needs a 13 or less to sneak past since their stealth of 14 is being compared to a perception of 12).

I know that systems with lots of dice and limited possibility of success per die are popular these days and I recognize that these give you something of a bell curve but the curves tend to come up rather lumpy and uneven.

@kitteh said in BSG: Unification:

In fact this entire thing seems like a weird and sort of mean derail, since we were mostly talking positively about the combat system.

Actually, I'm not trying to talk negatively about the combat system. I'm trying to say that in real life people in combat miss -a lot- and that the criticism that 'it's unrealistic to have experts missing so much' is not very valid. Even if you take the argument that each individual action does not represent a single squeeze of the trigger experts commonly have failed to pull off the objective of downing an opponent in combat.

While it may be apocryphal I've been told that the phrase 'the whole 9 yards' has its origins in World War I dogfighting. According to the story the belt of ammunition used by the British fighter planes was 27 feet long and it was not that uncommon in a combat to expend all your ammunition against a given opponent (thereby giving them 'the whole 9 yards'). Even if this is not the true origin of the phrase it should illustrate that it was common enough for someone to expend all the ammunition they were carrying (which most likely means that the pilot failed to kill their target since the odds that they downed them with the final few rounds are slim and you wouldn't keep firing once your opponent was rendered incapable of continuing combat, if for no other reason then you might get into another fight as you were returning home).

I apologize because I got a little lost in the weeds there when I was talking about how 'realism sucks'. That was not meant to be a ding against FS3 because I actually doubt FS3 has the really high level of realism that you might encounter where it would really suck. That was really meant to be a statement to the people who were arguing that the system was unrealistic; you -don't- want it more realistic. It will (probably) not result in you hitting your targets more. It will most likely result in you liking the game even less because while you -think- you are looking for realism what you are really looking for is the simulacrum of realism (in this case using the term in its artistic sense for an object which is actually distorted but which is distorted in such a way that it becomes more acceptable to the viewer than a properly proportioned object).

My statements aren't meant to address any issues with difference in skill between newbie pilots and veteran pilots or how much fun the system is. Those are completely separate issues and especially in the case of the last are extremely subjective.

@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:

@faraday

Hey, even most Superhero games don't model super powers that well, because there is always the power-vs-reality issue, whether or not it's physics (in which case "a wizard did it" applies), or ethics (which is not readily solvable).

It depends a little bit about what you are talking about with 'super powers'. Different companies have very different standards for 'super powers'. As an example compare DC in the mid to late 80's in which people like Superman or Green Lantern are capable of moving planets out of orbit while in Marvel the upper limit was the ability to lift around 100 tons (but see below). And then compare both of those with something like Marvel's New Universe which was also a superhero line but in which one of the strongest people on the planet tries to lift a bus only to end up ripping off the bumper, because really, buses aren't made to be supported by their bumper.

And of course all of that can be further complicated by writers doing really poor research. As an example while the strongest characters in Marvel were suppose to max out at lifting around 100 tons they would regularly do things far in excess of that because the writers had no clue how much 100 tons was (a 747 weighs over 3 times that much).

I always thought the Hero Games System (Champions) did a pretty good job of capturing the feel overall for Marvel comics (which was it's target) though it could be a bit math intensive when you were building a superhero.

Of course one big problem that just about every single game system has is 'realism'. Over in the FS3 thread people were complaining about how often an expert character misses in combat. Actually, that's pretty darn realistic. Having done RPGs for close to 4 decades I've seen plenty of articles where people grab honest to goodness actual data from organizations such as police departments and the FBI on shootings (both by civilians and by officers) and have built game systems around that data.

There is often a whole lot of missing going on and combat occurs at an awful lot shorter ranges than people think. When someone does get hit, according to the data, one of three things tends to happen. Either the person is killed outright (which actually doesn't tend to happen as often as people think), the person is immediately incapacitated, or the person keeps right on trucking along carried by adrenaline and barely slows down. When someone is shot 2 dozen times and they are killed it isn't because two dozen moderate injuries added up to something serious. It tends to be because one or two of those two dozen shots killed them outright.

This tends means that in a 'realistic' system players tend to feel like chumps because they are firing and reloading several times before they get any kind of significant hit and during these fights there is a significant chance that they may be killed outright (by significant I don't mean 20% or anything like that but let's just assume the odds are 5% that your character will die in combat. How many fights does the average character have in most game systems?)

In short, realism sucks. The whole reason people play games is to escape from what's real. What you really want are systems that give you 'acceptable' amounts of realism while remaining 'light enough' that they don't drag down game play. The only problem there, of course, is that different people are going to have different definitions of what is 'acceptable' and what is 'light enough'.

One possible variation that would help with the balance between dinosaur and newbie characters would be to have the character progression be linear but have the challenge resolution system work on a geometric system, such as a bell curve. When two characters are evenly matched the odds are 50/50. When one character has X points more than the other it moves to 75/25 and as that difference continues to increase the odds continue to approach some arbitrary maximum (such as 999/1 or 95/5 or whatever). The trick, though, is that it only approaches that point. It never reaches it. This means that both a guy with an 11 and a guy with a 12 will almost certainly beat the stuffing out of that guy with a 1 but the edge that the guy with the 12 has over the guy with the 11 is pretty slight in such a case. The only place where the guy with the 12 has a really noticeable advantage over the guy with the 11 is when the two of them are doing something really, really hard, and even then while it is a noticeable advantage it doesn't mean the guy with the 11 has no chance.

A lot of modern game systems actually use something like that though they may be unaware of it. FS3 does itself. The mechanism of rolling more dice and comparing them gives you that sort of distribution. The only problem is that because it is being done ad hoc rather than by design they often don't do it 'cleanly' and have spots where funny things can happen to the probabilities.

Naturally such a pure mathematical solution isn't something you would want to use in tabletop roleplay since it would be either a pain to be recalculating things all the time or else it would be very chart intensive but since our games occur inside computers we aren't limited by such things at all.

So earlier this year some people were talking about setting up a Docker image that could run TinyMux as sort of a way to quick-start a game. I've been doing a bit of work with it and have created a base image for TinyMux2.10. The only thing I'm having trouble with, as far as creating the image goes, is compiling it with the SSL flag, but beyond that I can compile with any options people would want. Considering that even if I were to get the SSL option working there would still be setup headaches on the part of the user with getting and installing certificates I'm not really going to worry about SSL as it seems a little beyond the goal of the project.

What I would like to ask now is what options would people like turned on? What softcode packages do people thing should be installed (I'm assuming Myrddin's Bulletin Board System and Anomaly Jobs, but what else)?

What kinds of behaviors do people want the system to have? At present the way I'm designing it is that there will be a folder called /mux2.10/game_1 that is shared with the host system. When you bring up the Docker container it runs a script to see if /mux2.10/game_1/data exists and if it doesn't it copies the contents of /mux2.10/game to /mux2.10/game_1 (I need to do it this way because the contents of the host machine take priority when the machine comes up and if Docker has to create the shared directory it will then be empty). After that quick check the script then launches the game. When the game is shutdown the container closes.

That's just the behavior that I think is a good idea, however. Since I'm really working on this to try and streamline things for other people what I think is a good idea may not be. Do other people have better ideas for behaviors for the system? What are people looking for?

I don't think Professional Training is in and of itself broken. I think it does have some flaws that need to be patched with houserules but the core concept after that isn't so bad. In it's own way it is sort of like specialization. You take Professional Training as a Doctor and now it is cheaper for you to advance your Doctor skills and that actually makes some sense. If I'm a Doctor I can probably pick up the intricacies of some subfield of Medicine than I can probably pick up the intricacies of a revolver over other firearms (in other words, the specialties for my field are cheaper than if I'm purchasing other specialties willy-nilly).

There's a little truth to the question of why buy Contacts when you get 2 contacts with your first dot of PT. Well, for one thing you can't raise the number of contacts any further. If I want a third contact I have to buy Contacts. Also, those two contacts have to be related to my field. Now the connection can be somewhat loose since if I'm a doctor at a hospital I can take the guy who works in the IT department and the head of the Hospital's legal department as contacts to help me out with computer and law issues, but I can't take Joe the Illegal Black-Market weapons dealer (of course you'll get some players who try and shoehorn Joe in by saying Joe is a janitor at the hospital who knows how to get his hands on some guns, but you just say 'No' when they try and do that).

The things that need to be 'patched' with houserules are that I would probably take away Rote and 9-Again with combat skills (and possibly with supernatural abilities). I think that the author when they wrote up Professional Training was a bit careless and didn't really think about people using those for combat (or powers). For 3 points I can get a 9-Again on two complete combat skills. There are 2 point merits that will give you a 9-Again but they don't even extend to an entire skill. They tend to extend to subsets like spears.

I know some people will say that makes those professions that have combat skills worthless because now only one of their skills benefits from Professional Training, but that's not true. The third and fourth dot benefits can still be applied to combat skills meaning you can get a discount on buying one (cheaper to raise your PT by one dot and then buying the asset skill point) and your specialties for your combat skills becomes cheaper. It may not be enough that without PT you are horribly gimped (which is sort of the idea) but it isn't anything to sneeze at, either.