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cptn_dr posted:gently caress I love Melbourne. That's what the Geist Dark Era is for, isn't it? Or you just go nuts and go full What We Do In the Shadows (although that's Wellington).
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May 27, 2016 06:31
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bewilderment posted:That's what the Geist Dark Era is for, isn't it?
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May 27, 2016 06:32
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Daeren posted:You had a dude with a doctorate come in and say that expecting people to accurately judge the outcome of a roll using the old system without professional training was presumptous, dude. There's an argument to be made here but you're sort of making yourself look like an rear end if you consider a scaling 9x10 matrix to be equivalent to fifth grade math. Deep thinking definitely is required to figure out the *exact* probabilities of a dice pool. For winging it, which is what this argument was about in the first place (remember the comment this whole line of discussion builds off?) it isn't really that hard. The supposition was that figuring out 6 dice/TN8 vs 5 dice/TN 7 was a difficult problem -- but it isn't a difficult problem. The difficult problem is figuring out that matrix. I explicitly agreed with that. What folks seem to be talking around is that this has nothing to do with a floating target number, and everything to do with dice pools as a thing. The thing that makes figuring exact per die probabilities? Again, not floating TNs, but dice tricks like 10 agains. But once again, if you multiply the set of successful die faces by 10, you get the per die probability before dice tricks. You add all the successful die faces and divide by 10 to get averages (again, *before* dice tricks). This doesn't get easier or harder based on TN, unless you remember what 3*6 is more easily than 5*4. So a third time, let me remind you: The issue on the table was whether 6 dice/TN 8 or 5 dice/TN 7 was better, and whether someone could easily eyeball it. This was supposed to be hard. It isn't. I'm sure every single person in this thread can eyeball the answer to this. At some point the goalposts got shifted to the stakes being whether someone can determine the exact relevant probabilities of a dice pools with a casual eyeball. This of course had nothing to do with the original point, but hey. The answer? Nah, you pretty much can't. You need that table. I'll set aside for a moment the fact that I've never seen a game stop so someone could consult a table. Variable TNs mean you need more and bigger tables. But essentially, they are also impractical to wing. So again, that doesn't matter. You'd need to look it up regardless. So to sum up: 1) These things are not that difficult to roughly eyeball. Roughly. To the extent of answering the thing that spawned this whole line of discussion. 2) They *are* difficult to figure out with exactitude. But this is a function of using dice pools and to a lesser extent, tricks such as x-agains. 3) So I don't think a small set of TN-adjusting powers in Mummy is a big deal. Folks have made a number of good points here. CWoD's design discipline regarding the role of different elements in the design is all over the place. Difficulty/TN is supposed to be how hard the thing is, and successes are supposed to be how well you do. 1s subtracting successes is a bad thing. All true! I think in the end Ferrinus has the coherent critiques here. Mummy's powers represent an esthetic choice some folks don't like, and there's nothing wrong with that sort of statement of preference at all. I feel the same way about power implementations that work around the 1-5 ladder as Disciplines, Arcana, etc. are). The ladder is incredibly handy, and I think in CofD folks should have a coherent reason why beyond esthetics. But that's a preference, not an argument to win. They're also right in that the real issue lies in situations where characters might be asked to choose between two options. Even though eyeballing it isn't hard, it does represent a pause which the design generally tries to avoid. But I think the fix here really lies in making sure these are not two different versions of the same action, but options with distinct rewards. CofD is tricky in that regard, because most Skills don't have hard-coded usages, so you can solve the same problem with multiple dice pools, as long as it makes vague narrative sense. Locking Skills in would create its own pause or channel for system mastery based on memorizing what they do.
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May 27, 2016 08:09
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MalcolmSheppard posted:So a third time, let me remind you: The issue on the table was whether 6 dice/TN 8 or 5 dice/TN 7 was better, and whether someone could easily eyeball it. This was supposed to be hard. It isn't. I'm sure every single person in this thread can eyeball the answer to this. You're comically wrong on this. Only one person in the thread did it so far. I can't even tell which one is better. Edit: And I've got enough basic knowledge in statistics to understand how you'd figure it out, so I'm not a complete layman here. MonsieurChoc fucked around with this message at 08:20 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 08:16
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I have absolutely no idea if 6D/TN8 or 5D/TN7 is better, and without reading this thread, I don't really know how to figure it out. I studied foreign languages in college, and took as few math courses as possible. Thinking about it, 6 dice at a 30% chance means 2 success, and 5 dice at a 40% chance means... two success? so they're the same. I'm quite sure I missed something you math brainics easily accounted for. EDIT: Yes, see, Bad At Math, 30% of 6 is slightly less than 2. FrostyPox fucked around with this message at 09:19 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 08:34
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Deep thinking definitely is required to figure out the *exact* probabilities of a dice pool. For winging it, which is what this argument was about in the first place (remember the comment this whole line of discussion builds off?) it isn't really that hard. The supposition was that figuring out 6 dice/TN8 vs 5 dice/TN 7 was a difficult problem -- but it isn't a difficult problem. The difficult problem is figuring out that matrix. I explicitly agreed with that. What folks seem to be talking around is that this has nothing to do with a floating target number, and everything to do with dice pools as a thing. The thing that makes figuring exact per die probabilities? Again, not floating TNs, but dice tricks like 10 agains. Look, how many times do you need to be told that for a lot of people doing that multiplication is more effort than they think is reasonable for their RPG sessions? Not everyone finds recalling the results of the multiplications table easy, and from the reactions in this thread, certainly not enjoyable. It might not be a huge issue if a game is designed such that the need to do multiplication is minimal, but the context of this entire discussion is "why do people hate variable TNs", to which "figuring out how likely something is and/or what the expected number of successes are on any given roll requires exponentiation and multiplication respectively, which many people find detrimental to their playing experience" appears to be the answer. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 08:42 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 08:39
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I've learned in general not to trust "eyeballing it". For example, I was running in a system where you could add a die to your roll, varying from d4 to d12, and a player had a feat that let them explode on the highest value and the next-highest value. So a d4 explodes on a 3-4 and a d12 explodes on a 11-12. And my players wanted to know: what die value gave the best average result? Because they felt low dice were more likely to get consistently high results, because they'd seen them explode repeatedly, and confirmation bias was deep in effect. But when I did the math, the result is simple, the higher the die, the higher the average result, even with explosions factored in. Low dice like a d4 got certain higher numbers relatively often (5-6 on a d4), but larger dice gave the best results overall. Their "eyeballing it" was flatly wrong when you did the math. And one of my players has a masters in physics, others had masters in things like history or economics or english. Not a bunch of uneducated guys, to be certain. A number of Exalted players I've known don't realize their odds of a single success given a certain number multiple dice are close to 50% because of the weighting at 10. And that's with a simpler system. If you've played in a lot of games with a lot of players, you'll realize there are some folks this just doesn't come naturally for. I know a guy whose father was a math professor working in lots of high-end theoretical math, and yet he tended up having to cram and test for the collegiate math competency course about a half-dozen times before passing. Whatever his father had that made him math-bright did not get passed down, not that he's bad at basic math at any stretch, but Calculus was a real stopping block for him. Assuming folks like this can work it out because you can is mistaken. That's not to say they aren't very intelligent people in other ways, of course. But it's like colorblindness - it's a very simple issue to account for and work around. But most designers don't even think of doing so, because they're used to math, so isn't everybody else? And I think it's a mistake. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 08:42 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 08:40
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MalcolmSheppard posted:But once again, if you multiply the set of successful die faces by 10, you get the per die probability before dice tricks. You add all the successful die faces and divide by 10 to get averages (again, *before* dice tricks). This doesn't get easier or harder based on TN, unless you remember what 3*6 is more easily than 5*4. That's all well and good but we're talking pools here. At which point we're playing with exponents.
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May 27, 2016 08:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:A number of Exalted players I've known don't realize their odds of a single success given a certain number multiple dice are close to 50% because of the weighting at 10. No, see, that's the funny thing. The expected number of successes per dice is 1 because of the weighting of the 10. But when you want only one or more successes, the probability of success is 40%, since getting 2 successes on a 10 isn't worth any more than 1 success. However, once the Difficulty becomes 2 or more, the weighting of the 10 starts giving benefits.
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May 27, 2016 08:53
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It was pretty easy to use mental math to figure out that 5 times .4 produces a bigger result than 6 times .3, but the fact that .6 to the 5th power is smaller than .7 to the 6th power is a little less intuitive, such that I wouldn't be shocked if someone who just cared about getting any success at all rather than the most successes on average might think that 6t8 was a safer bet.
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May 27, 2016 08:58
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FrostyPox posted:I have absolutely no idea if 6D/TN8 or 5D/TN7 is better, and without reading this thread, I don't really know how to figure it out.  Basically take this approach, but change the probabilities for 'Heads' and 'Tails' and change them to you chance of success for the TN and the chance of fail for the TN. Then the amount of branching done is determined by the size of dicepool. This is only valid if you ignore the reroll tricks. Thus the quick way to determine the chance of "getting at least a single success" is also connected to the chance of "getting no successes". 1-P(No sucesses) = P(At least one success) But asking my wife to calculate 0.8**6 vs 0.7**5 is not going to happen.
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May 27, 2016 12:38
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MonsieurChoc posted:You're comically wrong on this. Only one person in the thread did it so far. I can't even tell which one is better. Yeah, I can't immediately tell you which pool is better off. Anydice says you're better off with TN 7, 31% chance of fail or botch on the TN 8 vs 23% on TN 7. My eyeball would've gotten that wrong since I'd have added up more chance of success from more dice, since a tenth difference didn't meaningfully change things below ten dice. dr_ether posted:
Yeah but this is odds of at least one, which are a bit different. I can eyeball the average, though it's more work than I want to do for a game. "At least one" odds I'd at least want a calculator for.
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May 27, 2016 12:51
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spectralent posted:Yeah, I can't immediately tell you which pool is better off. Anydice says you're better off with TN 7, 31% chance of fail or botch on the TN 8 vs 23% on TN 7. My eyeball would've gotten that wrong since I'd have added up more chance of success from more dice, since a tenth difference didn't meaningfully change things below ten dice. Well exactly. And knowing you can get at least one success with a dicepool is pretty much the most standard thing you need to know. When the TN is fixed, it is immediately obvious that having more dice is better. But if TNs change along with dicepools and you have to make a meaningful choice about an action or how to spend xp, should I expect players to be dealing with working out if 1-0.6**5 is better than 1-0.7**6. Nope.
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May 27, 2016 12:58
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dr_ether posted:Well exactly. And knowing you can get at least one success with a dicepool is pretty much the most standard thing you need to know. When the TN is fixed, it is immediately obvious that having more dice is better. But if TNs change along with dicepools and you have to make a meaningful choice about an action or how to spend xp, should I expect players to be dealing with working out if 1-0.6**5 is better than 1-0.7**6. Even if you memorize the probabilities by rote, it's far easier to learn by rote the probability of success for any given dice pool for one static TN than it is to learn the same for a number of TNs. This is particularly relevant when you have dice-adding powers (like Vampires, who can spend Vitae for increased Attributes), because of the diminishing returns; having done through all the work of figuring out when it becomes a waste of Blood Points to add a dice to my Dexterity at TN 7, the results will not apply to TN 8.
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May 27, 2016 13:17
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LatwPIAT posted:Even if you memorize the probabilities by rote, it's far easier to learn by rote the probability of success for any given dice pool for one static TN than it is to learn the same for a number of TNs. This is particularly relevant when you have dice-adding powers (like Vampires, who can spend Vitae for increased Attributes), because of the diminishing returns; having done through all the work of figuring out when it becomes a waste of Blood Points to add a dice to my Dexterity at TN 7, the results will not apply to TN 8. This. As someone who actually does know and care enough about statistics to do the math and notice breakpoints and diminishing returns, this is the problem I've been having. With the nWoD system, I only have to figure out where the breakpoints are and then I know what it means to lose or gain a few dice. But in cWoD, well, I've been making a Vampire computer dude and it's been a constant stream of "wait, how much is this next dot worth? if I'm doing something at difficulty 7? 8? 9? What if I take Computer Aptitude? How does this affect my ability to get at least one success?"
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May 27, 2016 14:53
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If I want a game where I have to figure out lots of numbers beyond 'roll <x> dice', I'll play loving GURPS. (Which I do. With a calculator.)
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May 27, 2016 15:00
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I have a friend who studied math at a graduate level (and has a Master's in it) and went on to work in corporate finance. She doesn't play anything but one RPG because it's relatively math-light and she doesn't want to deal with more complicated math in other systems. The deficit for her is clearly not her intelligence or knowledge, it's her desire to put that much effort into a fun hobby activity. Maybe she also gets enough of math at work. One way or another, it doesn't matter how easy or hard something is or should be, if no one wants to bother because it's a pain in the rear end to deal with, it's a system that's not working.
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May 28, 2016 16:01
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MalcolmSheppard posted:So a third time, let me remind you: The issue on the table was whether 6 dice/TN 8 or 5 dice/TN 7 was better, and whether someone could easily eyeball it. This was supposed to be hard. It isn't. tl;dr, stop being this guy: 
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May 28, 2016 18:47
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The bigger question, never answered, is still 'What does it add to the game to complicate the math like that'.
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May 28, 2016 18:54
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The usual excuse I see for obfuscating system math is to force players to play intuitively and ignore the odds. Cortex+ seems entirely based around that notion, for example. I think it's a bit condescending, though I don't think that's necessarily intentional on the part of designers.
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May 28, 2016 20:15
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I still loving love that guy. "I, a paunchy, sedentary game developer am unable to easily complete this action, ergo a fantasy character in a fantasy universe with superlative, possibly even super-human dexterity cannot do it either".
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May 28, 2016 20:18
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FrostyPox posted:I still loving love that guy. I love the idea that it's a valid theorum to even develop a game around. I don't have any problem with the idea of some chubby gaming guy (so basically me) not being able to produce superhuman feats of dexterity, I have a problem with the idea that it's okay to sadle a player with a lovely choice for levels and levels and games and games because it's not 'realistic' or something. The problem with obsfuscating math is that it can result in unintuitive systems. For instance, in DnD, higher numbers should always be better and every power or feat should make you better at the thing it suggests on the tin. This was the classic problem with 3E's Toughness; it gave you more HP, sort of, but the math was sufficiently hosed that it was always a terrible choice, so it didn't actually make you more tough. Masquerade's system was perfectly functional, and the kind of unintuitive corner cases we're talking about are somewhat rare; but more intuitive systems have been developed in the mean time at very little 'overhead' cost to the system's granularity.
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May 28, 2016 20:33
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Ferrinus posted:That was exactly it. He asked some other writer/developer and was told "we don't know either, just follow your heart". (I used to misremember this as him being uncertain between TN increases and dicepool reductions, but oWoD didn't really have stuff mess with your dicepool) I remember reading that the same sentiment was held for 7th Sea and L5R which is why the system was changed to something at least vaguely more intuitive in 7th Sea 2E. It's still not 100% intuitive at where more dice in a large pool becomes worse than more dice in a small pool, but more dice is confirmed 100% better and adding more dice also comes into conjunction with die tricks (whose efficacy is also a mystery).
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May 28, 2016 20:55
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Yeah, as I said, I'm not really a math guy, the mathiest I get is Warmachine and there I basically just go "OK so 7+ is average-ish on 2d6, 10-ish on 3d6, so I will use this to decide whether I should buy additional attacks or buy boosts". Anything else and I'll just go with my (frequently incorrect) gut feeling. It matters less to me in RPGs cuz I'm not trying to "win", but basically any game that expects me to figure out multiplication or exponents or whatever is just gonna get an "lol whatever" from me and I'm gonna roll dice and whatever happens happens. So I'd prefer a system that's simple like "more dice= more gooderer".
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May 28, 2016 21:57
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On an unrelated note, having reread W20 again to get ready for a game that's starting up that I'm giving a try, I had a long-winded effort post typed up on my phone re my issues with Pure Breed only to end up losing the entire drat thing. So, imagine a large block of text here that ends with "who the gently caress thought that making the equivalent of racial purity in to a game mechanic was a good idea to start with".
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May 28, 2016 22:02
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citybeatnik posted:So, imagine a large block of text here that ends with "who the gently caress thought that making the equivalent of racial purity in to a game mechanic was a good idea to start with". Look, this is the game that has rules for raping corpses. What did you expect?
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May 28, 2016 22:12
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LatwPIAT posted:Look, this is the game that has rules for raping corpses. What did you expect? THAT'S a new one. 
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May 28, 2016 22:17
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Kavak posted:THAT'S a new one. It's not. Metis version of entering the Thrall of the Wyrm. Homid characters eat corpses and lupus ones try to turn nearby wounded INTO corpses.
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May 28, 2016 22:21
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citybeatnik posted:On an unrelated note, having reread W20 again to get ready for a game that's starting up that I'm giving a try, I had a long-winded effort post typed up on my phone re my issues with Pure Breed only to end up losing the entire drat thing. Werewolf being a crypto-fascist game built around Southern Revanchist "lost cause of the confederacy" is essentially the text without the sub now, especially in a product built around nostalgia to the problematic ideas we had two decades ago. It sucks a lot and I side-eye any person too loyal to the "classic old canon".
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May 28, 2016 22:26
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citybeatnik posted:So, imagine a large block of text here that ends with "who the gently caress thought that making the equivalent of racial purity in to a game mechanic was a good idea to start with".
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May 28, 2016 22:29
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Gerund posted:Werewolf being a crypto-fascist game built around Southern Revanchist "lost cause of the confederacy" is essentially the text without the sub now, especially in a product built around nostalgia to the problematic ideas we had two decades ago. It sucks a lot and I side-eye any person too loyal to the "classic old canon". And you'd think that with the W20 release they would have walked back from that a bit as opposed to making the thing more powerful. Yawgmoth posted:WoDGypsies.txt.pdf.exe And you'd think that they would have learned their lesson with that, since they ended up literally nuking an entire clan from orbit to make it all go away.
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May 28, 2016 22:37
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I, uh, am still relatively new to WoD stuff, and I know that quite a lot of the stuff is Supreme Edgelord territory, but, dare I ask, what's the deal with this nuked gypsy clan? e: is it the Ravnos? I don't know anything about the Ravnos
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May 28, 2016 23:51
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FrostyPox posted:I, uh, am still relatively new to WoD stuff, and I know that quite a lot of the stuff is Supreme Edgelord territory, but, dare I ask, what's the deal with this nuked gypsy clan? The Ravnos were one of the main 13 clans and were 1) gypsies, 2), tramps, 3) thieves, and 4) gypsy tramp thieves. Literally. They primarily embraced from the Roma, they traveled around constantly because no other vampire clan wanted them around, and their clan flaw drove them to steal or commit other petty crimes. They also couldn't be trusted, and their clan discipline let them create illusions to further trick people. They tried their damnest to walk this back through Revised, with them being presented as more and more of an Indian clan with a relatively rich history there - their powers of illusion came from their understanding of the illusionary nature of reality. The ones that entered Europe and what not had either been driven out by the mysterious Kindred of the East (that gameline had all sorts of issues of its own) or left because they were from the lower castes and were tired of being treated like poo poo. But they never really knew what to do with them in the game it felt like, and you still had white people using them as an excuse to play out fantasies of being a gypsy princess. So they had the founder of the clan wake up and start wrecking poo poo to kick off the Week of Nightmares/Gehenna. The Technocracy went General Sherman on it and everyone involved, dropping multiple nukes and focusing the light of the sun on it with multiple orbiting mirrors. And it STILL took a week to kill the loving thing. When it died its final act was to go "if I die I'm taking you fuckers with me!" and drive the overwhelming majority of the clan to commit suicide, mostly due to them frenzying during the day and running out in to the sun.
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May 29, 2016 00:03
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FrostyPox posted:I, uh, am still relatively new to WoD stuff, and I know that quite a lot of the stuff is Supreme Edgelord territory, but, dare I ask, what's the deal with this nuked gypsy clan? The death of Vampire: the Masquerade's Clan Ravnos bridged the line's earlier-nineties exoticism and facile racism of some white dudes in Georgia writing about vampires and the line's later-nineties bombast and excess soaked into the metaplot. Clan Ravnos, as originally presented, was pretty much the stereotype of the nomadic gypsy thief and con-man, with a Discipline that conjured illusions and a clan weakness of compulsive criminality and vice. ("Gypsy" in turn being an offensive slur for an oppressed European ethnic group; if you've ever referred to having been gypped by somebody, you accidentally said the equivalent of saying they Jewed you. The preferred term is Roma.) Then there was a big metaplot event where the ancient progenitor of Clan Ravnos awoke, and a big Dragonball Z crossover battle to prevent the ancient from causing mass disasters ensued, culminating in the antagonists from Mage dropping an enchanted nuclear strike and focusing sunlight with orbital mirrors, and sympathetic damage from the shock of their progenitor dying decimated Clan Ravnos. This is all separate from the book World of Darkness: Gypsies, which was literally about the Roma themselves rather than special Roma vampires, and gave them a stat to measure their Blood Purity and ancestral magic stealing powers. All of this was before my time so I'm sure I got a few of the details off. Point being: some of the oldest oWoD stuff is dire.
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May 29, 2016 00:08
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Huh.. Well... Huh.
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May 29, 2016 00:31
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And this is the world Paradox chose to go with when they bought the company  .If it turns out Beast had anything to do with that decision I'm probably going to explode.
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May 29, 2016 00:34
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Kavak posted:And this is the world Paradox chose to go with when they bought the company I do not understand this statement. I recall reading about Beast and feeling like the best thing I could say about it was that it totally missed the mark and was actually a huge wasted opportunity. IE Who is Paradox and are they rebooting it to oWoD or something? Cuz AFAIK Ravnos are a thing in VtR? I really want/need to get these books but I am pretty broke E; WHOOPS meant Ravnos AREN'T a thing in V:tR FrostyPox fucked around with this message at 00:43 on May 29, 2016 |
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May 29, 2016 00:35
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The Swedish company Paradox Interactive bought White Wolf last October- after very nearly deciding to order the nWoD cancelled, they let it continue as "Chronicles of Darkness" (I'm never going to call it that) and want to use the oWoD for LARPS and future video games, despite how incredibly outdated it is.
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May 29, 2016 00:40
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Ahhhh, I see. I've encountered a handful of old grogs grumbling about how nWoD RUINED EVERYTHING (tm) but I rather like what I've seen of it so far. oWoD seems all right and I'd like to get all the oWoD books just to have them for reference and maybe even play them once in a while but I really liked what I've seen (which basically consists of a bit of new Vampire and Mage, and I own Promethean and have read about new Demon). I'm not sure why they'd pick oWoD for video games and LARPs, perhaps to appease grogs?  EDIT: I mean, I'm actually not sure how you run Promethean since you literally can't stay in one place for too long and also everyone hates you eventually, but the idea is cool. EDIT: Oh, huh, just saw there's a second edition of Vampire: The Requiem. I have only played the first. FrostyPox fucked around with this message at 00:49 on May 29, 2016 |
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May 29, 2016 00:46
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They are grogs themselves in some ways, but nWoD never really caught on in Europe, which has always been their main market. We'll have to see how it goes.
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May 29, 2016 00:49
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