To complicate the statistical issue, a perception check: The "I'm Failing Too Much" is an ongoing issue, possibly due to confirmation bias. On pretty much every game I've coded dice for, I've had to show a brute-force test of the roller to prove to people that it was working as intended.
This conversation made me think of this, and I know people will say "that's not what we're talking about". I know this, thanks.
@faraday said in Shadowrun: Modern:
Oh, animism, not animalism. Important distinction
What? I didn't say...
... Oh goddamn it, iOS auto-correct. Er, yes, animism. Animistic. Animaniacs.
True randomness sadly, given the flaws in the human brain's construction, never appears random. While that which is emphatically non-random can appear random.
My god, you people are talking about two different game lines and a book series. Nerds.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said in FS3:
FS3 dice are very forgiving until they're...randomly not
Like that time you run into a door for no particular reason, no matter how good you are at door-opening. Tell me that it's never happened. Or missing that step on those stairs you've taken one million times. Or when your life was on the line and you missed the turn by a mere foot, sending you careening off the motorcycle and ended up hospitalized for months.
...
Just a little context shift can change a lot of perceptions. I recognize and will call out that Faraday said that she didn't know how to stop it from happening, and then WTFE offered some statistical recommendations.
...
The bit about people seeing that a game is FS3 and will immediately say "no" seems to me, a complete outsider, nothing to do with statistical probability curves. I mean, seriously, how many math nerds do you think there are analyzing game systems before deciding where to play? I'd put some money down that it's something else, tho making the expectation of skill vs. result more consistent probably wouldn't hurt.
Unless, I mean, the "trusting your life to the statistical edge of a knife doesn't always end nice" is intended.
@Arkandel said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
Everything is a 'belief' until proven otherwise
I...
@Arkandel said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
What were the results of your decades of research? What were your methods? Show me.
I...
You know, Ark, I know you really like playing Devil's Advocate (to a point where I suspect that you need some psychological help), but this takes the cake. You're all over the place, similar to the people who want to "disprove" global warming. I'd believe this was beneath you, but here you are.
We have methods for this determining what is true and what is not. Scientific Method is not a stick we measure things by. It's a way we discover those measurements. The basis of Scientific Method relies on disproving its discoveries. Without it, it would be a belief system. But it's not. Scientific Method does not have an enemy in the Bible, against Flat Earthers, against ghosts, against magic, against even Intelligent fucking Design.
And that's where I go from reading this thread with a modicum of interest to enough salt to attract all the deer in Ohio. (hint: there are a lot of deer in Ohio.) "Well, you don't really know-know, therefore what you're doing is belief" is the attack that the Discovery Institute has been doing to sell their snake oil as "science" to indoctrinate school children for the last decade or so.
Science is self-correcting. This isn't a belief. At best it's a philosophy.
We accept that it reveals truth because it's based in self-doubt. It works. If we can't accept this, then we might as well flip the table over the last three thousand years of trying to understand the world and just herp-derp our way into extinction.
Regarding Terry Pratchett and others:
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Oo, wait, I just found this one which is more appropriate to my above rant:
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?"
— Douglas Adams, paraphrase of a parable spoofing modern creationism that Adams often told, as retold by Richard Dawkins in "Lament for Douglas" (14 May 2001)
Crap, one more. I forgot how much I enjoyed Douglas' writing:
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
— Douglas Adams, from Last Chance To See
- Die results (perplexing, but maybe they just haven't played on other dice-using MU*s to realize that you fail just as often/more often there?)
Thinking about this: It is so easy to manipulate the advantages in World of Darkness games that it's probably us WoDers.
- [..] But even the guidance I did provide was often ignored.
This is more what I was aiming at. It's been a while, so drawing out that your toolkit is a toolkit and not meant to be a completed RPG system means that you don't have an ultimate control over how people experience the game, yet things that aren't about the dice roller, as interesting as they are, are not under much your control.
--
@Seraphim73 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.
I fucking love 1-3, but I love low fantasy. I love games where "how can I eat?" is an honest question, because it builds my perception of the character, and when they survive to level 16 I feel like I've done something epic.
My last D&D character, many many years ago, started as a completely green schlub who lived in the part of the country where many world-famous adventurers came from (Forgotten Realms, The Dales). But he wanted to go out and Be An Adventurer And Do Good For The World!!!! Worse, his family was a very well-off middle-class merchant family, so his entire story was about him learning the hardships of choosing to be essentially lower-class and spurning his father's trade was challenging. Sure you can do that starting at level 3, too, but I don't see D&D as a wargame simulation, even though that's how it was designed, but as a toolkit to tell stories in a particular setting.
This isn't relevant, but I loved that character. Our adventuring party had done a crap-ton of Good(tm) by the end of the campaign. I like to think that my Generic Fighter character retired after a scant five years of adventuring a mature and stable man, and husband, to help expand his father's business. I may never know. (Though he probably got into politics, to be honest. By the time we were done, running a successful horse breeding merchant business probably was too small a world to him. His wife, on the other hand, probably would've done while her husband was out playing Hero. Neutral Good. It was fucking awesome.)
(another edit):
His wife was one of a pair of Damsels In Distress that our group rescued in a situation so cliche that I was fully expecting them to be polymorphed demons or something -- thus breaking cliche by following a different cliche! They were practically strong-armed into getting married by a crazy hermit dude who worshiped the absentee First God, Ao. During an adventure. She was an NPC who the DM thought it would be interesting to make her the daughter of a somewhat powerful merchant trader, too. I think this was one of the ways that our DM rewarded us instead of yet another boring "you discover 100 gold pieces". 500gp for returning the man's eldest daughter? Nice. Introducing a reoccurring character? Priceless.
Oh yeah, and she was wicked practical. Pairing up with a kind of ditzy goodie-goodie Adventurer was a funny and meaningful balance.
I like getting XP, but things like this are why I RP. You can't make a stat or rewards system that does this.
@Ganymede said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
Despite being a lawyerbot, I hedge on the side of: wait and see.
As a fairly hard-core atheist, I strongly agree with this.
What I see in the current discussion is two positions on the same side of the coin: "This is what we know" and "But things can change about what we know." Both are healthy, but I find that we need both. Sometimes I find the science-minded too focused on the science and not on the discovery. Sometimes I find the layman too focused on the discovery and not the science. My earlier blah blah about Einstein and Oppenheimer was meant to be a parable about how there's room for both.
weird gamer whining
Gamers are usually both:
Math geeks, or sensitive to math or the results of math. In "Indie Gaming" terms, they're gameists, looking for how to win, how to use the system to get the result that they, as players, want. This makes a lot of sense since D&D began its life as a series of war-game simulations for the armed forces.
Privileged. This is a hobby, this is how we spend our free time, and the term "power fantasy" doesn't begin to cover it. Whether or not you treat the game as a recreation of your favorite TV show or movie (ignoring that these characters fail all the time) or as something else.
I don't find this weird, I find this tired. You have no idea how long I've watched @WTFE try to play Alpha Nerd on these boards, shouting people down rather than working with them to unveil issues. But I can't blame him, since I've seen people on games yell each other down for decades.
Faraday isn't a yelling kind of person. I mistakenly tried to defend her in threads; she is not stupid or cruel and while I get that way when people yell at her, it's mostly because I'm afraid that she will do what all adults do in the face of people acting like complete dicks and leave.
Maybe that's the goal. People telling her that she's wrong want her to leave. I don't know if this classification of people is a "troll", but I do, like you, think it's a dick move.
It seems unusual that to be Christian in America seems to mean to be Conservative so strongly that if someone wanted to identify as a Liberal Christian, I'm not sure what they would say. Nothing, perhaps.
But as was said earlier, testing what the system does via brute force (Monte Carlo) or via straight up analysis doesn't change perceptions. You don't just make games to fit a certain model, but to fit a certain feel. Is that feel to make the characters bullet sponges, or is it to make it extremely hard to hit anything but to make that rare hit count? Is an ace pilot one that hits better or one that comes back from more missions?
Most of what I see in this thread is disagreement of expectations.
Thesis: Throw a random statement in the center of a bunch of nerds and you will end up with chaos.
Discussion, Debate, and Commons: Wut? No, you! No, your mom! Wut? Science isn't magic! Magic isn't discussed! But science! Wut? Science! No, science! No, your mom science! Wut?
Conclusion: Nerds are fucking weird.
@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:
Or maybe it's because there's a sense of entitlement that expects staff to be their personal tabletop GM.
I missed this one; thanks @WTFE.
It's up to staff to inform members how to play the game. Not because players need their precious hands held, but because every game does it entirely differently. They need someone to lead. This is why games opened by friends and allies tend to gather more invested players; everyone there is on the same page already and there's more of it to go around. Getting critical mass helps a ton.
If staff wants the game to run a certain way, staff must help players learn how to play because only staff know how.
That won't stop me from making an open game with few rules and let the players play, e.g., minor deities working at a giant mall however they like, but most of the games were talking about are very structured.
Thank you, Suicide Squad adverts, for proving that Bohemian Rhapsody can be ruined if you take it far enough out of context without providing juxtaposition or consideration to either source materials. You might as well have overlaid OMFG's Hello. It would have worked just as well.
@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:
@ThatGuyThere how is that different from a MU though? I don't see the phone number analogy relating to a MU.
I am Thenomain. You are Faraday. These are who we are, our identifiers. While we might not be afraid of someone getting ahold of us, we are sometimes concerned about defending ourselves. We expose ourselves by linking our RP to our online identities.
Not quite the phone number analogy, but it's my take away.
Social Crucible. I can either find the change or bring change to pretty much any situation I find myself in. Fire is almost never involved. Almost.
@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:
@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
But how many know that they know, how many would know how to set up and manage multiple accounts with their email client, or know how to find a better client that would do this? How many would give up before getting that far?
But let's back up a step. How many Millennials would even care in the first place?
Find some and ask, and a very mild shame on you for thinking this is about Millennials. This is about barrier to entry and, apparently, being a single person to answer any other person's moving the goalpost. I'm being talked down by a lot of people, but so far nobody else has attempted even a tacit nod toward information gathering. How can we identify issues without escaping--to put it crudely for effect--this echo chamber?
I am clearly not going to be considered by the vocal, but I've done enough project work, enough information gathering, to know that what's going on here is closed-system thinking. My conclusions might be wrong, but I'd rather look further afield and be wrong than say "everyone else does it, therefore it must be right".
Fresh gunpowder black.
My favorite is 100 Mile Tea. It can keep me awake for days on one cup. The world starts to blur after a few minutes on this stuff.
Lipton makes the single best bagged brewed iced tea on the planet. No shame in that.
@Cupcake said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Would it be wrong of me to hope certain players come back because he's gone?
It's never wrong of someone to hope that people you like to play with can be played with more.
Not less forgiving.
Less forgetful.
As in fuck "forgive and forget". Forgive and remember.
Those who forget the past...
