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Leperflesh posted:"It's really not that hard to understand" is precisely the defense that was mounted for THAC0. The measure shouldn't be "can someone figure this out;" it should be "Is this the simplest, most straightforward mechanic that adequately accomplishes the design goals." Now, I'm not going to defend the 15's. Those are definitely harder and probably wreak merry hell with the game's probability curves. 10's, when you're using 10-sided dice, aren't.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:00 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 12:00 |
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You guys see Monte Cook's new poo poo? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/montecookgames/worlds-of-the-cypher-system?ref=category_recommended
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:18 |
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jivjov posted:Also ending very soon is Aaron Allston's Strike Force. I honestly don't know a lot about the game or system, I backed it solely because I loved Allston's novels and wanted to show some posthumous appreciation. Well, poo poo. I would have been all over this, 'specially with them getting Dennis Loubet to do the art again. Completely flew under my radar, though. You have failed me, thread!
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:21 |
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signalnoise posted:You guys see Monte Cook's new poo poo? I would be more excited to see Monte Cook's new shirt than to see any more Cypher System products.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:21 |
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signalnoise posted:You guys see Monte Cook's new poo poo?
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:21 |
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Explore new worlds and play in any genre, so long as your character concepts can be boiled down to Fighters, Wizards, and Rogues. What game will Monte Cook badly implement ideas from next? Will there be an entire dimension devoted to Gypsy stereotypes? Back to find out!
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:25 |
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dwarf74 posted:Seriously, though, if you want to talk about a bad system... Has he still not fixed the Death Spiral in the system yet? I mean, it would be as simple as "Player characters have Health equal to the sum of their maximum stat pools. When they lose 1/3 of their health, they're X. When they lose 2/3, they're Y. When they lose 3/3, they're unconscious." Ya know instead of your fate point pool also being your health. Also, this is the second game to come out on Kickstarter that looks like it was inspired by Exalted... Godbound: A Game of Divine Heroes has launched. It's an OSR game so interest in that subsection of the hobby is necessary. Kevin Crawford has consistently released on time in the past, his products have high quality and production values, and have been pretty fun. Also, to my knowledge, he isn't "outdated" is his views like some of the OSR, if you know what I mean. If you want to try before you buy, he has put up a link to the game that he wanted backers to share.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:45 |
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Isn't that the system that actively punishes you for doing anything as a melee class?
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:46 |
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signalnoise posted:You guys see Monte Cook's new poo poo? How does this guy make 77k in the first 24 hours when his games are so bad? There is no justice in the tradgames design world.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:47 |
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gnome7 posted:How does this guy make 77k in the first 24 hours when his games are so bad? Name recognition, mostly.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:49 |
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gnome7 posted:How does this guy make 77k in the first 24 hours when his games are so bad?
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:51 |
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legit post: The settings for the Cypher KS are actually interesting. Seizing the power of fantasy gods? Sci-fi dino wrangling in prehistory? Supers where having powers drives you 90's Iron Age? Sounds fun! But then they're tied to this system where your character is good at ONE THING and just this ONE THING forever, and has all this stuff that's so "babby's first storygaem" it's depressing.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:54 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:Seriously, gently caress this hobby. There is a lot of reasons to say gently caress this hobby. A lot of. But, name recognition getting money for products that are worse than smaller, independent titles is more a business constant than anything unique to the hobby.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:58 |
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Covok posted:There is a lot of reasons to say gently caress this hobby. A lot of. But, name recognition getting money for products that are worse than smaller, independent titles is more a business constant than anything unique to the hobby. Yeah. I know I'm the one who posed the question but it was mostly rhetorical. This guy's got 20 years of name recognition and successfully delivered products and that makes you money even if what you're delivering isn't very good. I know why he's making money, I'm just sad about how it's an order of magnitude more money than what I get. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Mar 1, 2016 |
# ? Mar 1, 2016 22:03 |
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Covok posted:There is a lot of reasons to say gently caress this hobby. A lot of. But, name recognition getting money for products that are worse than smaller, independent titles is more a business constant than anything unique to the hobby. Ceterum censeo Frank Trollman esse delendam.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 22:04 |
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gnome7 posted:How does this guy make 77k in the first 24 hours when his games are so bad? Monte Cook is mediocre at design but fantastic at self-promotion. Compare his fame to that of Tweet or poor forgotten Williams, and that's because whenever he launches anything, he makes sure his name is as prominent as the title. Guy somehow got Monte Cook's World of Darkness published, since his name has become a brand bearing his section of the 3e triforce. After all, Sean K launched a game design career based on being "the guy who designed the krenshar", and by comparison, Cook was exposed directly to the feat forge. So if you think d20 was great design - and since it was a formative game for a lot of folks, there will always be people who do - the Monte Cook brand is an extension of that success, something he will never let you forget.
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# ? Mar 1, 2016 22:41 |
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Covok posted:Has he still not fixed the Death Spiral in the system yet? Sine Nomine Publishing has another Kickstarter. Godbound The art budget has clearly increased. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1637945166/godbound-a-game-of-divine-heroes quote:Godbound is a tabletop role-playing game of newborn divinities awakening to unimaginable power. These men and women find themselves bound to the Words of Creation, the primal powers of a fallen cosmos where the Throne of God stands empty.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 01:01 |
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dwarf74 posted:It actually seems less hard than THAC0 by a wide margin, since you're generally just making groups of "biggest die+smallest dice possible to get at least 10" and don't need to subtract. I'm seriously convinced that basic board game mechanics are too complicated for TRPG players because they require more than ten seconds in Excel to optimize.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 04:17 |
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm seriously convinced that basic board game mechanics are too complicated for TRPG players because they require more than ten seconds in Excel to optimize. Please post the excel code to "optimize" 7S 2E. Seriously! Because AFAIK it requires considering every possible N-partitioning of of dice to be sure you get the right answer (hence NP-complete), and I'd love a counter-example! If you do it out to, say, 7 dice, I'll be satisfied. E: As a start to your claim, here's the code I wrote in Haskell for the claims I made before: code:
QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 05:42 |
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quote:Please post the excel code to "optimize" 7S 2E. Seriously! Because AFAIK it requires considering every possible N-partitioning of of dice to be sure you get the right answer (hence NP-complete), and I'd love a counter-example! If you do it out to, say, 7 dice, I'll be satisfied. The DP solution is O(2^n); 2^7 is 128. This isn't going to burn out any computers, and is not going to be hard to work out in Excel. That said, I don't think the system is a good idea; it's not a fun little puzzle or something, it's just a little bit of boring work you get to do sometimes if you want the best rolls. Like, imagine instead of numbers on dice they put equations, and so if you had to pick a dice you'd need to solve a few chunks of math. Would that make your pirate game better? I don't think so; I think it would drag the game to a halt the first time a critical edge case comes up. And once everyone generally had it worked out, it would just be a little bit of extra boredom every time. VVV: Lol, yes, VBA is Turing complete and up to the task... The following is terrible code, but is probably right (it's been a while since my TopCoder days, I'm not going to look up Gosper's Hack for this, and I don't actually have a copy of Excel at home to test with). code:
jmzero fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 05:56 |
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Board games are specific use cases. Rpgs are inherently about rules that follow unpredictable narrative.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 05:58 |
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QuantumNinja posted:Please post the excel code to "optimize" 7S 2E. Seriously! Because AFAIK it requires considering every possible N-partitioning of of dice to be sure you get the right answer (hence NP-complete), and I'd love a counter-example! If you do it out to, say, 7 dice, I'll be satisfied. I don't think you understood my point. I am in favor of it not being trivial to optimize, because optimization and the gameplay it drives bore me and the attitudes behind it generally detract from my game experience.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 06:00 |
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jmzero posted:The DP solution is O(2^n); 2^7 is 128. This isn't going to burn out any computers, and is not going to be hard to work out in Excel. Of course,, it all makes sense now. 7th Sea 2nd Edition is actually Frog Fractions 2!
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 06:01 |
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jmzero posted:The DP solution is O(2^n); 2^7 is 128. This isn't going to burn out any computers, and is not going to be hard to work out in Excel. Yeah, I'm not concerned a computer can't do it. See: QuantumNinja posted:While it's relatively doable for small inputs (and 7S restricts inputs to <=10), it's still a dumb way to build a game system. I just wanted to watch someone to a DP solution in Excel E: And, yeah, basically the ideal thing to do would be to print out the four pieces of paper with the optimal solutions. Look up your roll, report the solution to the GM. But that indexing, even, is freaking dumb. E2: VVVVVVVV Leperflesh, you're killing the dream! QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 06:02 |
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QuantumNinja posted:I just wanted to watch someone to a DP solution in Excel You can embed VBA into Excel so it's actually... well, not trivial, someone would have to re-write the code you wrote in VBA, but it's not like you'd have to do it all using Excel functions. e. It looks like VBA might not be touring-complete. But, there are plugins for embedding full-blown C++, for example. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 06:08 |
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Kickstarter suggested The Name of God to me. Does anyone know anything about it?
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 06:59 |
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Meanwhile, in the hot aftermarket accessories department: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/878938288/the-lazy-gamer (disclaimer: I know exactly zero of these people, but they post in the local games fbook and the picture backgrounds are of one of our local gaming stores) Have fun with our cheap as poo poo Canadian exchange rate
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 07:19 |
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You really shouldn't have to code an Excel macro in order to assemble the best possible result off a pool of d10s.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 09:52 |
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SaviourX posted:Meanwhile, in the hot aftermarket accessories department: This is almost a good idea, but just feels like a recipe for player areas getting swept clean and things sliding about after over enthusiastic pushing
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 10:06 |
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Liquid Communism posted:I don't think you understood my point. I am in favor of it not being trivial to optimize, because optimization and the gameplay it drives bore me and the attitudes behind it generally detract from my game experience. It's not even about optimizing a character. It's about optimizing the outcome of a given roll based on what it's results could be. I don't think there's a die system that actually makes this a situation. There are two consequences as of now in the system for poor optimization of a roll outcome: 1. Number of raises (success) in a roll and 2. Number of leftover dice accessible for the GM to trade for Dread Points in exchange for one Hero Point. As an example (a big edge case), take a roll of 8,5,1,1,1,1,1. There'll only ever be one raise from this roll, but depending on how the dice are grouped is the difference between the GM given a ton of resources to go to town on PCs in exchange for a single point of a more meager one for one trade. The mentioned heuristic of adding smallest+biggest actually fails here. The best outcome is: 5,1,1,1,1,1 and the 8 left over (a heuristic of packing smaller numbers first is the best method here).
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 10:21 |
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Mojo Jojo posted:This is almost a good idea, but just feels like a recipe for player areas getting swept clean and things sliding about after over enthusiastic pushing I agree, though it at least looks like they made the base tall enough to clear dice and meeples.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 13:37 |
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SaviourX posted:Meanwhile, in the hot aftermarket accessories department: This is kind of a neat idea, but you could build something comparable with a turn table and a trip to Home Depot for a lot less.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 15:51 |
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Absolutely, it doesn't take a lot of effort or expense to make a big lazy susan. Their selling point seems to be that they're offering craftsmanship and something that will look a lot better than a slab of plywood, no matter how you doll it up.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 16:37 |
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SaviourX posted:Meanwhile, in the hot aftermarket accessories department: So that's kind of interesting, actually. I somewhat wish it were magnetic, though, as that could address a lot of the sliding problems with a little modification to the components of one's favorite games. It does look as though it would make a mess of games for which you sleeved the cards.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 16:48 |
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This kickstarter just popped up in my Facebook feed, for 28mm scaled furniture: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cybernoir/stone-skulls-28mm-tabletop-gaming-miniature-furnit gets you in at four pieces of decent-sized furniture.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:09 |
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Jumping in a little late on the 7th Sea thing, but I agree with QN that it's a bad idea to use systems like this. In this case, the outcomes are computationally difficult but fairly easy to approximate intuitively for small inputs. The problem isn't with optimizing characters. I don't care for the idea that a resolution system with an obfuscated probability curve is a good way to prevent optimization races like in Shadowrun. The problem in those games is that some choices are definitively better than others because of rule interactions. If you want to avoid that kind of thing, a simpler resolution system is better for designers since they can spot degenerate cases and avoid weird exploits more easily. And that's the problem with a resolution system like this. It becomes very hard from the design standpoint to avoid corner cases and problematic rule interactions - especially later on as expansions and splats add more rules and character options. We've all seen how a seemingly benign addition can spiral out of control when combined with obscure rule X and character option Y. The harder it is to determine the probabilities of a resolution system, the harder it is to prevent a design error like that. What worries me about 7th Sea's system isn't that I can't build the perfect character in it. It's that it's hard to tell if a character that's extremely effective is just getting lucky or is actually broken without sitting down and doing a lot of work. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:30 |
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Liquid Communism posted:I don't think you understood my point. I am in favor of it not being trivial to optimize, because optimization and the gameplay it drives bore me and the attitudes behind it generally detract from my game experience. The way to deal with optimization issues is to try and make the in-built character options fairly even, so low and high optimization are able to both play in the same narrative. This doesn't stop optimization, it just means that only the people who take their time to figure out the formulas behind it will be able to optimize, and those who can't or won't will lag behind. And as Xel said, it's not even what we normally think of as optimization. It's "Does my character have a decent shot at jumping across that ravine?" It makes it difficult to be able to judge the odds, even in situations where the character should know. I mean, if it's a situation where the character has no idea, the GM can just say "You're not sure," and let you gamble that the DC is within your grasp. If it's something your character can look at and say "I've got a pretty good shot at this," you should know that as a player. Not knowing when it's an easy or a difficult roll makes it tough to be able to say "You know what, I'm gonna risk it. I should be able to do it." Or even, "It's a long shot, but I'll give it a go," because you don't know when it's a long shot or not. Of course, eventually you'll get used to the system enough that you will be able to get a good gauge on it. And then you're at exactly the same point you were before, you just had to take some time to get a handle on the odds, when you could have known them straight out of the box. Nothing is really gained.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:35 |
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Also, obfuscating math never lasts. Give nerds long enough after 7th Sea's launch and, just like roll and keep, they'll be a probability calculator for it. It's a dumb solution to a problem. Optimixation fans aren't a problem that needs solutions, anyway.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 17:45 |
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Covok posted:Also, obfuscating math never lasts. Give nerds long enough after 7th Sea's launch and, just like roll and keep, they'll be a probability calculator for it. The solution to Optimizers is not making it more difficult, but making it more trivial. Presumably Wick has a table showing the odds on how many raises are possible. I may presume too much though.
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# ? Mar 2, 2016 19:27 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 12:00 |
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Oh, hey, look. A video from the devs pointing out that building raises is a thing that literally takes a couple seconds, because it is first grade math. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sSDB_jLSTs Also, another sourcebook added, this time for the New World's Colonies as the $900k stretch goal. We're already at nine books, so this would round it out for 10 and it's only $60k off with 11 days left. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Mar 2, 2016 |
# ? Mar 2, 2016 19:38 |