Posts made by WTFE

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

@WTFE said in FS3:

Apparently I was playing earlier versions of the game that were more prone to failures.
Nope. I am reporting on my experiences with the FS3 system and why it is that "we use FS3" is a mark against a game as a result.

So you're complaining about a past version of the game, based on your perception on a situation where (I think) we all admit that our perceptions are biased to remember failures over successes, and you don't think that you might be protesting too much? Really?

Yes. The question I always have when people say "but have you tried X version?" is "how many fucking times do I have to ram my head into a brick wall before I'm allowed to conclude that brick walls fucking HURT no matter what colour they're painted!?" I didn't play on one game with FS3. I've played on at least a half-dozen. FS3 is now, confusingly, on its third major version (and were there minor versions in between?). This is the third version made by the same person who seems to have the same specific goals in mind (very narrow subset of genres, an insistence on low numbers of rolls while at the same time relying on purely stochastic processes, etc.). MAYBE the things I found so off-putting are fixed ... but I'm really not in that big a hurry to ram my head into the brick wall again.

@Thenomain said in FS3:

@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.

More relevantly, tell me that's never happened in the fiction that most MUSHes are trying to emulate. Stupid random shit happens all the time in real life. In, say, Arnie flicks ... not so much.

Setbacks happen in heroic fiction (and related subgenres) all the time ... but they do not happen at random. They happen for a purpose that furthers the story. Obviously this ideal cannot be reached 100% in a game, but it is something games should at least strive for, and one of the first tools in the toolbox for accomplishing this is various means to mitigate the randomness. Not eliminate it, note. mitigate it.

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.

Yeah, I don't give a shit about the "probability curves". I give a shit about the feet-on-the-ground experience. And my experience with (previous versions of) FS3 has been almost, but not quite, uniformly negative and specifically in the realm of "the sheet writes cheques the system can't cash". Use of FS3 isn't an "autonope" but it's a fairly thick black mark against a game. Maybe the new system will fix this. (Almost certainly improved documentation will help too.) But I've had too many bad experiences with the system across several games now for me to just forget it all and try again with cleared preconceptions.

@Ganymede said in FS3:

Apparently I was playing earlier versions of the game that were more prone to failures.

Maybe. Might I suggest that you are protesting a bit much, then?

Nope. I am reporting on my experiences with the FS3 system and why it is that "we use FS3" is a mark against a game as a result. I'm also explaining exactly how it is that you can have "the numbers" say one thing while "perception" says something entirely different. I mean you can see faraday's frustration at how the numbers say that people are succeeding all the time while she has to keep pushing the odds up higher to the point that nobody fails anymore.

And I think that's bad too, incidentally, because while it does stop Assie McBad from coming across as Assie McRainbowButt, it also makes it so that Assie McBad ain't actually all that much better than Hum the Ho either when both are shooting at enemies. (Obviously, given the chart above, if they're shooting at each other Assie will wipe the floor.)

And I pretty much place the blame for these issues straight at the feet of insisting on a purely stochastic resolution system without giving it enough samples. One thing or another has to change if you want to both distinguish a badass from a plod and not make the badass occasionally get frustrated (which will be magnified in memory because human nature) by occasionally being a clown instead. Either more samples have to be used or you have to fudge the purity of the stochastic resolution.

@Ganymede Apparently I was playing earlier versions of the game that were more prone to failures.

@Thenomain I can't even begin to count the number of times I've cracked open the code to a die roller because I was convinced there was a flaw in it that was biasing the results. Or later how many times I just did a quick monte carlo of, say, a hundred thousand virtual rolls to check similar perceptions. 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.

@faraday said in FS3:

And in large part I agree with it. It’s not fun to miss all the time. It’s not fun when you build a character around a concept of being good at X, and then the one time you have to use X in a scene, you fail (even if you would’ve succeeded at that roll 95% of the time overall). It's boring when combat rounds are just everyone whiffing at each other (in fact, I've been known to immediately trigger another turn when that happens).

I just don’t know how to fix that with dice.

The problem with FS3 is that the number of times you do actually have to roll is so small that any failure is magnified tremendously. If you only roll three times in a combat, even a single failure is going to make a "can't miss, hotshot badass" look "ho-hum". If the character is, by reading the sheet, supposed to be "ho-hum" that's not a problem. But when the character sheet reads "this guy is a veritable god of combat" failing even one out of three is pretty bad.

But that's not how perversity works. Perversity will have you failing two times out of three . Or even all three times.

The problem is that you're insisting on a (weighted) stochastic resolution system without realizing that those weights will only be visible after a whole lot of samples. That's how stochastic systems work: emergent properties emerge after a whole lot of samples. For any small group of samples the emergent properties are invisible or, worse, as seems to be the case with FS3, grossly distorted in perception.

Part of this is that we tend to remember things that surprise us more than we remember things that go as expected. If I'm playing Joe Badass Hotshot and I make a shot, that's a "well, duh!" result that's not worthy of notice. If, however, I'm playing Joe Badass hotshot and I fail a shot ... that's unexpected and will be noticed and remembered. And if I go through a whole combat without ever making a shot -- something that can happen with far greater frequency when the number of rolls is small than when large -- that's going to leave the impression that the character sheet is writing cheques the system can't cover.

So there's two solutions to this:

1. Mitigate the stochastic nature of the system. This can be done by a variety of mechanisms. CORPS uses an auto-success if the (modified) difficulty is below a certain threshold against your skill. Other systems provide luck points (under a bewildering variety of names) that permit you to do controlled editing of the stochastic weirdness. (Some of those even allow you to use the luck points as a two-edged sword -- swapping an unimportant failure for success where it is important, for example.) Some provide a system of "level shifts" that monkey around with probabilities and skills in such a way as to let badasses be badasses where they're supposed to be (wading through mooks, say) while making real challenges, well, really challenging.
2. Make the system use its stochastic samples enough that emergent properties actually emerge in a single conflict. This means no more "a whole combat can be resolved in three rounds" naturally, but that's your trade-off if you're going to insist on a purely (weighted) stochastic resolution system.

@Seraphim73 said in FS3:

@WTFE In my own system, I did something similar to the autosuccess mechanic you mentioned. When your character is unhurt, not suffering some negative circumstance, and not trying anything tricky (ie, they have the lowest possible target number for their roll), they can trade dice for successes (4:1 trade instead of the 50% odds for each dice when rolling at the lowest possible target number).

In CORPS this would have been handled by these circumstances (wounds, negative circumstances, trick actions) altering the difficulty and, of course, if the difficulty passes the threshold of your skill it's time to roll again.

This means that someone with a Professional rating can trade dice for a simple Success without a chance of failure (on a simple task), or they can roll and hope they roll with the odds and get two successes.

And yes, that's the tradeoff in CORPS as well, albeit by a different mechanism. Only a simple success is automatic. If you want better successes, you have to face the dice, and that includes the possibility of failure results or worse. So...

Even for an expert with a 10 skill can only trade for 2 successes, so they're not likely to actually wound someone with 4 dice rolling against them, but they'll nail an inner ring (but not the bullseye) every single time.

...this circumstance is the case in CORPS as well. If you need higher successes to reach gaps in armour or whatever the automatic single success won't help much. Time to face the die.

But what I like about these systems (yours and CORPS) is that by design they mean you only roll the dice when your reach exceeds your grasp or when the chips are down and you have to do something vitally important. The game is more streamlined, runs faster, and doesn't give you that "stormtrooper marksman" feeling I got when playing a lot of systems (including FS3).

As for FS3 being slanted toward succeeding a lot... older versions weren't nearly as success-heavy.

That may have been what's generated this unmitigated negative reaction I have when I see FS3 touted on a game. I have no idea what version I used when I played. (Having what looks like a version number in the name without it actually being a version number adds to this confusion, I suspect.)

Also, when you're in combat, and you have someone rolling against you, things get swing-ier. When you then add in armor penetration and lethality rolls, they get even swingier. It's definitely easy to absolutely fail to hurt an enemy for several turns in a row. It's also possible to hit every single time, do damage every single time, and KO an enemy every single time. It happens. RNG is R.

I was facing things where I was simply missing all the time. And, as I said, because the combats tended to be so short, it made my competent characters come across as the plucky comic relief when it happened. (And it happened far too often for my tastes.)

I don't mind failed rolls or even failed scenes if the opposition warrants it. Hell, failure leads to more future fun typically! But when you come across as the rainbow butt monkey of the group--and when this happens enough times that it becomes a bad running gag like a late-'90s SNL sketch--when all the numbers say you're a competent professional it's really damned off-putting.

Still an issue, but it's going to be an issue for most any system except CORPS, it sounds like.

Or systems like the one you described. Or games like Fate Core/FAE (which is the game that's pretty much replaced CORPS in my affections these days) where you have an economy of fate points; where you can choose to fail (or worse) now to succeed later.

Say hello to part of last night's dinner:

Perky little fella, ain't he?

NOT SO PERKY ANYMORE ARE YOU LITTLE GUY!?

But oh, so tasty!

@faraday said in FS3:

Personally though I prefer the element of chance when the circumstances are challenging.

sigh

One last try before I just assume you're deliberately reading past everything to find things to disagree with.

Even people who qualify as Expert Marksmen on the target range miss in combat. A lot.

And if your skill system is based on range performance this would be a legitimate criticism. But wait, no it wouldn't! Because if you're an expert at the range the difficulty of your shots would rocket way the fuck up in actual combat and ... be still my beating heart ... you'd have to roll!

I mean I did say (several times, now) that it was the adjusted difficulty that was used for this, right? (Hint: Yes. Yes I did.)

Your sheet tells you what you're baseline capabilities are.

No. In most games popular these days your sheet tells you precisely fuck and all of what your capabilities are because most people can't calculate the byzantine odds most games give you on die rolls. But if you have a sane system that you can calculate odds on easily this is still largely irrelevant because...

Rolls tell how you perform under pressure.

... this is true in CORPS as well. All that CORPS does is define what situations are "under pressure" differently. In the CORPS ethos the bar for "under pressure" rises along with your expertise. A neophyte trying to shoot a gangbanger at 15 paces in a brightly-lit street is "under pressure". A grizzled veteran who's been in active combat for two and a half decades isn't going to have that situation register as a credible threat, not to mention consider it "pressure".

FS3 dice stats are slanted compared to many other systems so that people succeed a lot.

This was not my experience with the system. I quite often came out of combats feeling frustrated because my "competent professional" character wasn't able to handle even fucking mooks. The randomness factor was too high and the number of rounds in an average combat was too low. It happened far too often that my characters went through the game like Star Wars' stormtroopers. It only took three or four consecutive bad rolls to come out feeling like you were playing the plucky comedy relief instead of the hero while everybody around you just casually sliced through the opposition like it wasn't there.

Every time it happened I thought back to CORPS and sighed.

The CORPS system has auto-success for any task whose (modified) difficulty level is equal to or under your skill level.

ANY task. At ANY time.

So yes, you only apply the game mechanics under stress, facing challenging circumstances, in conflict with another, etc. You don't go through the process of setting and adjusting difficulty levels to have a pro musician play a scale. It's just that you don't (have to) roll the dice (unless you want to) if the difficulty is below a certain point after adjustment. Experts can be actually expert. Competent people feel competent.

This one simple little rule made CORPS my go-to game for modern and near-modern settings for ages.

@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:

@Three-Eyed-Crow
I can understand that, I think lot comes down to how we as players see the characters. If they continuously fail at what they are statted to be good at through luck it gets to be irritating because damn it this character is supposed to be good at that.

This is a continual problem in RPGs that a variety of mechanisms have been used to solve. One of my favourite such mechanisms is the one used in ... I want to say CORPS: any difficulty up to your level of expertise is an automatic success. If you have level 7 skill (which is pretty fucking high) any task of up to difficulty 7 is an automatic success. No roll, no nothing. You succeed. If you still WANT to roll (for getting exceptional successes, etc.) you can. And if you choose to go that route you live with the results. But if a basic success is all you're looking for, there's no roll. At all.

The system supported fully all the weirdnesses of things like nobodies KOing a Big Bad by wild-assed lucky rolling, but it didn't mandate wild-assed rolling for every situation. I found that remarkably refreshing after a year of playing a "commando" in ... I want to say Traveller? ... who never managed to successfully hit a target.

@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

The SUSPECT flag does something close to this, adding every single thing typed by a person to the hardcode log file, where it can be poured over.

<peeve type="pet">Pored. Pored over.</peeve>

Set up a complaints system that each time you complain about someone it adds a bit of a delay to everything they do. And to everything you do.

If one person pisses off a lot of people, a lot of people have a short (imperceptible) delay on their command processing, but the person who pissed off so many will have lag that renders their ability to play unusable.

If one person goes around complaining about a dozen different people, a dozen people have an imperceptible delay on their commands but the whiny snowflake is lagged to perdition.

Have the lag rating fall off at a rate of, say, one complaint-equivalent per day.

Watch your game go up in smoke in the most entertaining of ways!

@Thenomain: Do you have any idea how painful it is unbinding bound feet? I only do that to her as punishment.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I'll go a step and a half farther than that: aside from Europe and its satellite cultures, the swastika has never been tainted in its meaning. It took me a few seconds to find that pendant on Taobao. Swastikas are common good luck charms and images all over east and south Asia. You can find them in temples, on buildings, on business cards, in homes, on jewellery ... and it's really jarring the first few dozen times you see them.

Now ... well, when I went to Canada last summer I was wearing a bracelet. This one:

Take a closer look at the barrel-shaped bead near the centre...

@Rook said in State of Things:

Interesting. I hadn't heard of this... but it just goes to prove a few things.

Anything can get all twisted and turned to mean something entirely opposite... but the sick thing is that people then believe that new meaning. It just goes to show how easily swayed and driven today's people can be, out of ignorance.

That's the scary part.

You could take a picture of, I dunno, a daisy in a pot and post a meme of hatred, get a huge internet segment to push it as a joke, and suddenly I would bet that daisy sales at florists would plummet.

Doesn't that scare the shit out of any of you?

Nope. Whenever I get tempted to get my undies in a bunch over this I think of what would happen if my wife wore this pendant in Canada:

Things change. Meanings change. Associations change. It's called "life" and if you're scared of it you may wish to consider the possibility of never leaving your home.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

If y'all seriously think it is "hubris at a level that staggers the imagination" to ask that people label common trigger content when advertising an event or starting a game so that people can effectively "get the fuck out of things that trigger them" and make informed decisions to avoid the content they know will be problematic in order to avoid problems for themselves and others around them, I know for damned sure this is not the hobby for me any longer.

Your reading comprehension is usually better than this:

It's OK to ask that I'm a bit careful around common trigger issues (like rape, say, or excessive gore).

It's like I ... already said this.

The point is that there are literally BILLIONS of triggers out there. Name something. ANYTHING. Oranges. Cuttlefish. Cheap Chinese oscilloscopes. Anything. Someone, somewhere, will be triggered. (Hell, that last one is self-triggering!)

I have a trigger. One that was once verging on the crippling and even now is pretty shattering when it fires. And it's of a dramatic situation that's so common no reasonable person is ever going to guess it in advance. Any attempt to come up with a way to get me to avoid situations that will fire off that trigger is going to be comically unmanageable. The onus is on me, not on everybody else in the fucking universe, to deal with the situation if it arises or, if I can't, to get the fuck out and stop fucking up everybody else's entertainment.

And if that last thing is the solution? Fuck yeah, that's going to suck for me (or whoever is dealing with the trigger). But welcome to life. It largely sucks like a broken Hoover: badly.

@mietze said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

If that makes me "entitled" so be it, but I have enough dealing with mentally ill/selfish or narcissistic/emotional vampires in my RL extended family and volunteering organizations at present that I could not tolerate it in my recreational activities. When I did, or attempted to, the outcome was not well received by the other person ever and certainly didn't improve my experience in the hobby.

Emphasized for truth.

It's OK to ask that I'm a bit careful around common trigger issues (like rape, say, or excessive gore). In the end, however, it is up to the triggered people to get the fuck out of things that trigger them. Demanding that everybody around them conform to their psychological quirks is hubris at a level that staggers the imagination.

And lest someone screech "PRIVILEGE" at me, I have my own fucking trigger. It's a circumstance that happens a whole fucking lot in dramatic fiction of all stripes--even in CHILDREN'S LITERATURE. It's the kind of thing that if it catches me unaware it can fuck up a day (or longer, in my weaker moments) as I work through some very complicated (and once-crippling) emotional and mental states that have been going on for about two decades now.

I'm going to guess that not a single person who's ever played with me over the past two decades knows what that trigger is. They may have even seen the trigger go off and not recognized that it happened. This is because I kind of think that it would be shitty of me to dump my emotional triggers onto other people who are just playing a fucking game.

If your triggers are such that you can't make this considerate, considered decision, then fuck yeah, I don't want you anywhere near a hobby of pretendy fun-time games! And if that makes me an asshole, fine, so be it, consider me to be your personal asshole placed on the world solely to make you miserable.

edited to add

For a clue as to just how wide-ranging this trigger of mine is:

1. I was unable to read all the way through Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale the first time because I got blind-sided by it. It took three YEARS before I had the courage to pick up the book and face it again. And it was a rough ride even when forewarned and prepared.
2. One of my favourite books as a child--The Little Prince--is a book I can only read with great caution these days. I have to start from a good place to not emerge from it a wreck.
3. Naguib Mahfouz's (in?)famous Cairo Trilogy took me eight tries to get through because the motherfucker blindsided me, like, every fiftieth page or so.
4. There's two episodes of Star Trek (the real one, not the latter-day shit rip-offs) I can't really enjoy any longer because of this trigger.

When I say this trigger happens a whole fucking lot, I really mean it!

@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@WTFE

Eh, I never minded people wanting to raise awareness of something without being an activist for it.

I did stipulate "'raising awareness' of things people have known for decades". If it's genuinely something new or not really very high up in the public consciousness, awareness-raising is a valuable first step. The problem is when you've got people "raising awareness" for ... I don't know ... breast cancer. Which has about a million foundations from the small to the ginormous doing active research and awareness raising for decades now.

If they donate one dollar to a cause and ask everyone they know to also donate one dollar to a cause, they're still doing something for that cause.

Donating isn't awareness raising. Donation is an actual action. It's activism (albeit often pretty piddling activism--most people donate less to charities they purportedly "believe in" than they spend on drinking sugar and water in cans). Putting on a ribbon or tweeting a hashtag is bullshit.

My general rule of thumb is "if it doesn't cost you something, you're posing". That cost can be time, or money, or even peace of mind. Hashtag and ribbon slacktivism costs you nothing except dignity which, given that people are doing, you know, hashtag and ribbon slacktivism instead of real things, there isn't a whole lot of to begin with in that crowd.

@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@WTFE

Yeah, but doesn't 'slacktivism' describe a greater social application of the political correctness that we have watched turn from "be nice to others" to "be nice to meeeeeeeeeee!!!!" ...?

That … isn't how I've ever heard it used, no.

Slacktivism is "activism" the lazy way. Most ribbon campaigns of the '90s, for example (or anything else that's "raising awareness" of things people have known for decades). Or bumper sticker slacktivism starting in the '50s and going strong still. All the lazy-assed ways people show they "care" by doing something trivial, whether that's sending ferocious tweets or wearing a zillion colourful ribbons. You know "activism" without actually doing anything.