Posts made by The Sands

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

OK so, yeah, common sense is actually neither of those things because Seduction isn't necessarily sexual in nature and getting Billy Badboy to knock over a coffee shop is something he's likely to do anyway, so good job identifying that as a good and reasonable use of social skills, but there's absolutely no reason that a female with high seduction can't charm a gay guy by some means toward any goal at all unless he actually literally has a stat that allows him to ignore Seduction.

But this is one of the big issues right here. In the example Suzie is using a specific type of action to influence Billy and Gary and that action doesn't work against Gary. In essence Suzie is trying to shoot Gary with a gun that has no bullets (or more accurately, bullets Gary is immune to). I'm not saying that Suzie is never going to be able to influence Gary simply because she's a woman but she's going to need some other kind of ammunition to do so (cash, convincing Gary that his partner has been unfaithful, threats against Gary's well-being, etc.)

Now you could abstract the system so much that Suzie only has to say 'I want to try and use Persuasion on Gary' and then we roll dice but do we really want a system that abstract? It seems to me like you're in real danger of:

'I enter the bar'
(die roll)
'My clothes appeal to people'
(die roll)
'People enjoy my presence'
<OOC> Thanks for the scene guys.

Of course that's a gross exaggeration and I'm not completely sure my concern is great enough to say 'don't go that way'. I'm just positing the negatives.

The idea that Suzie says '<OOC> I want to use Persuasion on Gary' and then the two players work out a reasonable solution for how Suzie is able to persuade Gary is a definite possibility. The only problem is this solution works between two players who can come to an agreement. It doesn't solve the issue of the completely recalcitrant player which means you've now codified a system (and increased the complexity of the game by adding more rules) that still may not resolve the original problem.

@lithium I'm quite willing to play by the rules. I'm simply suggesting that if you want these rules you come up with a system that makes some sense.

It's too complex? Well then, maybe you shouldn't try and force people to use something even you admit is broken.

The real thing, however, is you said 'People who die on the 'Player Agency' hill will not be happy with any sort of social combat system' and I'm saying 'Nope. Try again'. I think 'Player Agency' is quite important, yet I just demonstrated that I could be happy with a good social combat system. Such a system might not currently exist but your statement implies that I will never be happy with a system and that is simply untrue.

And WTF is up with you telling me to play by the rules? I have said 'this is what you need to do' or 'that is a problem'. I have never said 'I will just ignore that rule if you try and make me follow it'. Hell no. If I'm see a game with rules like this that I don't like I'm just going to walk away. You don't get to accuse me of 'not following the rules' because I won't play your broken system.

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

People who die on the 'Player Agency' hill will not be happy with any sort of social combat system.

Not true. You want a social combat system where I am 'intimidated' and the rules say 'this is how it is handled' then I'm all for it (assuming I feel the rules for how it is handled are reasonable. After all, I would certainly object if the rules say I keel over from a heart attack because you got 1 success on your Presence + Intimidate roll and I have no chance to resist).

But it has to be a system that I feel takes into account the complexity of a character. Suzie Social fluttering her eyelids might be able to make Billy Badboy knock over a coffee shop for her but she should have no hope in Hell of making Gary Gayguy (and I hope no one takes offense at that name) kill his partner because Suzie Social isn't offering anything Gary is interested in.

@thatguythere Replied to you over here since people have requested repeatedly to move this conversation from this thread: http://musoapbox.net/topic/2121/skills-and-fluff-in-wod/4

@thatguythere So then you would have no trouble with me saying 'oh, you can't shoot him because your Firearms skill is too low'?

Yes, ideally fluff and rules should be in tune with one another, but when the two are wildly out of tune usually you are going to have rules trump over fluff. Sure, it is easy to say that the point of the rules is to support the stories, but honestly, are you going to jack up the stats for some piece of equipment because someone wrote a bad bit of fluff?

As a complete non-WoD example, in Eclipse Phase there is a morph (body a person can be downloaded into) called the Fenris. It is about the size of a small car like a Prius. There is a picture of the morph in relation to a normal sized person that is provided specifically to give you scale and it has the Large Size trait rather than the Very Large Size trait. Someone, however, when writing up the fluff about how bad-ass this combat morph is suppose to be said it is as strong as a super-heavy tank which of course has caused all sorts of people to lose their minds and try to come up with ways to make this small car sized thing as powerful as a super-heavy tank.

It's all utterly pointless, of course, because no matter how much armor you can bolt on to your Prius and how big a gun you can mount on it you will never have as much armor or as big a gun as an actually super-heavy tank because a super-heavy tank is bigger than a Prius. People try to say 'oh, but this is the future and maybe they can make tough armor that is only 3 cm thick'. Great. Any particular reason then that the super-heavy tank doesn't have 20 cm of that same armor?

Sure, occasionally there are things just broken between fluff and rules where you might want to go the way of fluff. If you have to break core aspects of the game system though (normal skill actions are resolved through adding the appropriate attribute to the appropriate skill and rolling that many dice) you're probably going to far.

It boggles my mind a little how much people want to try and protect such poorly written fluff, incidentally. According to what people say it is evidently only slightly harder to learn to be a Doctor (requiring Medicine-3) than it is to learn drive stick (requiring Drive-2). When I learned how to drive I learned how to drive stick and while it has been a really long time since I learned how to drive I don't recall it being anywhere near as difficult as four years of undergraduate school, four years of medical school, residency, and then passing a medical review board. I mean, sure, it's a dot less. So why don't we just knock that down to what, two years of school? That's like less than 1/4 of what it takes to get 3 dots. That seems fair. Of course it only took me a couple of weekends to learn to drive stick, but maybe I'm just a fast learner.

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

The problem and the solution in WoD based games is just simple math. If you min-max your starting dots, there is a point down the road where you have the exact same stats as someone who did not min-max at chargen, but you have 50 xp more to spend.

At that point though do you really have the same stats? That's like saying I have the same net worth as Bill Gates except he's got $91.6 billion more than me.

@bored Actually, in this context 'Generalist' means 'Someone who didn't jam all his point into the fewest things possible in CG'. In my example the Generalist bought the exact same skills (in the end) as the Specialist, and spent the same amount of XP, but because he didn't exit CG as a brain-damaged idiot-savant who would have been removed by natural selection before his 18th birthday the Generalist has fewer points in skills than the Specialist.

And I'm not saying min-maxers are brain damaged, I'm not saying they only play brain damaged characters. What I'm saying is the system is designed to encourage that type of character. Honestly, if you try and make a non-brain damaged Specialist (I bought a bare minimum of 'everyday skills' and then focused hard on just a couple of combat skills) the Specialist will be at a disadvantage to the 'I exited CG brain damaged but got better' character, not just immediately after CG but for the rest of their lives.

@tinuviel "Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”

@tinuviel It happens. Sometimes it's people who just don't care. Sometimes its people who are new and don't quite realize what they are doing.

@catsnake Probably the easiest hack I can think of would be to create a merit that people can purchase. After being exposed to a Promethean and suffering through some Disquiet the PC has simply built up a resistance to Disquiet. It doesn't mean they are completely immune to the feelings but it won't progress past a certain point.

Naturally large portions of the NPC population aren't going to buy it so the Prometheans still have to worry about torches and pitchforks but at least characters who want to will be able to interact with them.

Honestly I'm still not sure I understand the (emotional) purpose of the Wasteland effect and would be tempted to just chuck it. Maybe there's some kind of special thing going on in Miami that prevents it from happening. Maybe you just completely strike it and say it doesn't exist.

@wretched http://musoapbox.net/topic/2121/skills-and-fluff-in-wod

Since people can't stop bringing it up in the Min-Maxing thread:

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

@the-sands But that's the entire reason modifiers exist in nWoD. For situational advantages/disadvantages. They would still have the same dice pool for treating a gunshot wound, for the reasons I previously mentioned, but a test on the subject matter that the int 5 guy never actually went to school on, I would most definitely say he would take a -modifier for.

That is not a situation modifier. Situation modifiers are this such as 'you're operating in the dark' or 'people are shooting at you' and they apply to everyone evenly. 'I'm going to give you a -2 to this that I'm not giving to another player' is just being a douche (N.B.: There could be valid reasons for one character to suffer a penalty while the other doesn't, such as if the nurses only speak Spanish, but what you're saying is 'sure, you've got the same chance to do anything but I'm going to give you a penalty anyway because I am somehow offended that you are just as talented as someone else that I've classified as a doctor'.)

Do you plan to start giving people situational modifiers based on their Firearms skill? (Well, yes, you would have a six die pool but see only 2 of those dots come from Firearms, so I'm going to give you a penalty).

More than that, do you plan on letting me play a Doctor with 1 Int and 3 Medicine? After all, the fluff says I'm a doctor and according to you that's all that matters, right?

@thenomain Ok. So I think I've still been operating about 5 degrees off the mark and now I've got a better idea what you're asking. I thought you had been asking what to consider modifying when converting a TT game to a MU*.

If, instead, what you are looking for is a way to package up a game and its rules so that people can quickly deploy their own game I've been thinking about this with Mocker and this is what I would do:

First, generate the system so that existing data items can easily be 'removed'. For example, if you are setting up a CoD codebase then make a couple of flags for the spheres. If someone wants to set up a game without Prometheans then they turn off the flag that allows Prometheans. No one can make a Promethean in CG, none of the Promethean commands show up when someone types +help. Flags can also be set for lower levels such as disallowing a particular Bloodline or Discipline because it is very common to have a game where Prometheans are allowed but Unfleshed aren't.

Store the data in SQL. Digging through data objects sucks. Provide php scripts so that staff can view and modify the existing data. Even without the scripts tools like MySQL workbench make editing the data so much easier it's ridiculous.

Of course since you are providing PHP scripts you'll need to setup a web server and since you're doing that you might as well provide a wiki. If you're installing a wiki you might as well install some basic templates such as a character template, a log template, and a house rules template.

I don't ask for much for my nickle, do I?

Is this the kind of thing you were looking for?

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

So the Int 5 medicine 1 doctor has those dice because they are THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WORLD, and with a little medical knowledge they can get by helping heal someone by using the enormous power of their brain. They would however, probably fail medical tests and wouldn't be a doctor because they lack the raw knowledge.

This is where I disagree. They wouldn't fail the tests because the tests still have to use the 'rules system' of the world. In other words, the tests are going to be an Intelligence + Medicine roll. The testing board doesn't have some super special way to only test the skill.

You can argue pool modifiers if you want but I have never seen a pool modifier that says 'penalty because skill is too low' (with the exception of being completely untrained). That would be almost akin to 'die penalty because pool is too small'. It's just not the way the system is written and if an ST tried to pull that I would probably walk out since I have no assurance they aren't about to throw down '-2 because I want you to fail'.

@thatguythere It's not an issue that there is no incentive not to do that. The problem is that, as the system is written, there is strong incentive to do that.

In other words, if you have a system that removes min-maxing and someone wants to make the idiot-savant that then learns social skills they can. They aren't harmed by the lack of min-maxing and they can continue with their RP without any problems. If they want to stay the idiot-savant they will, in fact, always have the advantage (barring skill caps) because they started out ahead. They just have to make their initial 'sacrifices' permanent.

However, if you have a system that has min-maxing than the Generalist definitely is being punished. They are at a disadvantage forever. Even if the Specialist backtracks to pick up the skills they missed the Generalist is behind.

Maybe you think I'm against the idea of the super-specialized guy who is great at what he does. I'm not. I like that concept and have no problem with it. I might have issues if a game makes them overly powerful because they're specialists (e.g. basically no one else can hit the specialist swordsman because of the game mechanics making him completely unstoppable to anyone but another specialist swordsman) but I'm fine with the core concept. What I'm not fine with is 'I said I was a Specialist Swordsman but now that we've earned some XP I know everything the Generalist does and I'm still better with my specialist stuff'.

@misadventure No, because again the thing that says 'Medicine-3 is a doctor' is just fluff. If both characters went before the medical board and took their test they would have the exact same chance at succeeding. This is why the fluff is so pointless.

Now if you want to say it shouldn't work like that and the system should be written so that there is a quantifiable difference between someone with 5 Int + 1 Medicine over someone else with 3 Int and 3 Medicine I'm all for it. I'm not arguing that at all. I hate the idea that the person with 5 Int can become as skilled as a trained Doctor. However, that isn't the way the system is written.

Honest to God, if you wanted to try and 'fix' at least the majority of min-maxing in the WoD system I would do it this way:

Characters start with a 1 in all Attibutes and a 0 in all skills. They get assigned a lump of XP. They then chose their Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary attributes. What this means is they must spend at least X amount of XP in each category (with the most being spent in their Primary, the second largest being spend in their Secondary, and the smallest being spent on their Tertiary).

The same thing happens with their skills.

There's a fixed amount of XP that they must spend on either Merits or on their Power stat.

There's a fixed amount of XP they have to spend on their Disciplines, Contracts, etc.

Anything left over can be spent however they want or (possibly) banked for later.

Clever people may notice that there is no bonus to assigning one group of stats as Primary over another if they end up costing the same amount. It is simply a mechanism to try and make players decide that their character is more Physical or Mental or Social instead of being simply average all around. Likewise with skills. It would be entirely possible to throw out Primary/Secondary/Tertiary and instead say 'you must spend at least X on Attributes and Y on Skills and let people chose what works best for them.

@thatguythere I think you're missing the point. It isn't that the Generalist will get pushed to the side because the Specialist has skills that are higher than the Generalist. It's that all the Specialist's skills end up higher (or as high) as the Generalist.

Look at my example above about the two characters who leave CP and after a bit of XP the Specialist is able to catch up on the skills they missed while the Generalist is still stuck behind the Specialist. That kind of system encourages people to be exiting CG with highly specialized idiot-savants who are the greatest snipers in the world but who can't tie their shoes or string together two sentences, which would be fine if that were their actual character design but after they gain just a modicum of XP they suddenly learn these skills which have eluded them the past 20 years.

It seems to me like the best way to avoid min-maxing is to make your system 'investment based'.

What I mean by this is that you should at the very least theoretically be able to store every skill and stat as a sort of 'investment' (e.g. the amount of XP you've spent on a given skill). This does not mean you can instantly tell what a given skill is at just from looking at the investment but you could calculate it if you needed to.

As a completely hypothetical example, you could say that the cost for a given skill is (roughly) 4.64^Level where what you are spending is 'hours'. An average person can learn the first dot in a given skill in a class. An average person who has been working a job for 1 months would have about 3 dots in that skill. An average person who has been working at that job for 5 years (the mythical 10,000 hours) would have 6 dots. At any point you could take the log(hours invested) * 3 / 2 and that would tell you their skill.

Attributes might modify the investment. Your Dexterity is not added to your Drive skill. If you Drive is a 1 you pretty much suck at driving. However, if you have a good Dexterity you will learn faster. Your Dexterity might give you a x2 or x3 bonus on the experience. It doesn't reduce the cost but it multiplies the effect (so if your Dexterity changes you can become a better/worse driver even though your investment in Drive didn't change). Someone with an awesome Dexterity can become a passable driver very quickly, but they still need to invest at least some time in it.

At the end of the day it wouldn't be possible to min-max because if you spend 10 hours learning a skill, 100 hours learning another, and then 90 hours on the first skill again it would be no different than someone who spent 100 hours on the skill and then 100 hours on the second skill. Both totals would work out the same way.