@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
The guy took on a whole squad of 9 guys armed with assault rifles. He died. So it models failure of one vs. many real well.
Was this ever a question? Was this a problem that VtM needed solved? That is, was this one person's death a surprise?
If so, I'm flabbergasted. If not, I'm confused why you brought this up.
@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
Though the one guy did get murdered by tons of gunfire, so...
So ... what, exactly?
I'm currently having a very interesting discussion with @faraday about winning and losing in dice-based RPGs. I believe that a starting character should be capable, but not masterful. From *coughcoughtoomany* years of playing WoD games, I see people including me trying to make characters that cannot do with stats what their concept demands.
Getting killed in a hail of gunfire doesn't break my expectation that a hail of gunfire is not something you should be able to easily survive.
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.
I believe you're right, but I think our typical 3-round WoD combat of, say, 6 total participants (PCs and NPCs) probably has around 18 (combat) + 12 (preparation) = 30 rolls. If we're lucky. That is a huge sample size, and skews what we know of WoD. Mind you, WoD also has one billionty thousand permutations of attributes, skills, powers, and other nonsense, many of them designed to completely overwhelm the situations we tend to have (i.e., combat and precious little else).
I guess my point here is that it's just important how you play a game as what the stat system looks like.
The Humble Store is having a Spring Sale.
"The Witcher Adventure (board) Game" is on sale for $3. I understand it's rather good.
Enjoy.
So on Aether (anyone remember Aether? I know a few of you did), we abstracted a percentile system. People could see their percentile, but when it came to comparison, they only knew how that related to the percentiles of others. That is, did they succeed "overwhelming" or "barely" or somewhere in between? Eventually we revealed the percentage, but only how much better you were.
There was some threat that people would do the math to find out the exact value of someone else's stats, but two things were in our favor.
My favorite application of this in a success/fail system is the "success with drawback" or "fail with partial success" in the middle. I've seen some better than others, but it does mean that even at Maxed Out Perfect there's a chance where you'll have to take a hit.
... I have distracted myself and not directly responded to your post. I hope this is interesting and can help.
Looking at @Bobotron's sheet.
Art? Art? Thank god it's in super early development.
This looks like a starting character. Did it feel capable? Please say 'yes'. Pllleaaaaaase say 'yes'.
@Thenomain Because you can start that high.
Argh enter. Like starting with a 5 in WoD. Although I dunno, maybe that's not a thing WoD MU*s do?
You can.
So you're saying that 6 to 12 is relatively equal in overall performance. I believe that people are so used to min-maxing while trusting the rule-set that sure, Person A will take something at 12, and sure Person B will look at Person A as the epitome of that ability.
If there is no outgoing reason to take a skill above 6, then the system is kind of lying to them. Not lying, but not helping people play it well? Like, I don't know, saying that the queen in Chess can move 'up to 7 spaces in any direction'. It's not a lie, but it's not the best way of describing the piece's ability.
Yes, this is me exploring the dissonance between what people expect (they may not be right!) and what game rules actually do (it may not be right!). This is really about trying to find @kitteh's underlying issue, as it seems to be based on perception. You two are saying different things about the same game system, that's for sure.
@Arkandel said in Random links:
@Auspice Ron Perlman?
Rob Perlman can play whoever the hell Ron Perlman wants to play. If he wanted to play Kitty Pride, I would not be disappointed.
Freaked out a bit, but not disappointed.
@Thenomain Sure, but on a lot of FS3 games it happens on day 1
We just had Faraday saying how hard it is to happen ("over a year"), so how is it happening on Day 1?
And then everyone has 12s and I'm useless.
In other games we call this the Dino Problem. That is, people who have been around enough that they can take, say, their '9' skill and make it a '12', and new people feel that they have no chance to compete. The people who are this dedicated are unlikely to let their characters die and are unlikely to move on, they sit there and grab the easy food and you feel like you're a mammal dodging between their legs for crumbs.
This isn't always true, and may not be an exact metaphor for FS3.
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.
Uhhhh why is a developer who shares their system being criticized for making improvements or changes and making them available to people 3 times in 10 years?
As long as it's constructive, and mostly has been. WTFE is just being a jerk about it because I think he doesn't know how not to be, but his points were taken by Faraday, who is amazingly patient with us. We're probably not as bad as corporate management.
- 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.
@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.
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.
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.
@Arkandel said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
@Thenomain said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
but the more I think of seeing the name "Mark Rein-Hagen" and how people left even Onyx Path over the hiring of Zak at White Wolf, I'm not sure I can be excited for this.
For those of us not keeping up with the Joneses, can you explain this? The names mean nothing to me.
Mark Rein-Hagen (actually, the dash is the bullet-point dot, and sometimes he got snippy about this) was the co-owner of White Wolf Game Studios and creator of Vampire: The Masquerade. He's the reason for some of the more faux-edgy decisions in Werewolf, the god-awful Bunk Cards in Changeling, and the schitzophrenic magic system in Mage. Also, see above re: him getting snippy about people not putting the bullet in his name. That was pretty typical of 1990s Mark. Maybe he's changed. Dunno.
I don't see any evidence on his Wikipedia page that he's working for White Wolf. Still, seeing his name associated with White Wolf makes me cautiously pessimistic.
Since there's been some confusion over it, I was replying to this:
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.
I didn't think to quote it, because I was making the comment directly following the thing I was commenting about. Sheesh.