|
Pollyanna posted:I'd actually like to know something myself: Exceptional X-Men, a Marvel Heroic PbP that started last year and is still ongoing.
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 18:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 17:53 |
|
|
Pollyanna posted:I'd actually like to know something myself: - Dragon's Delve megadungeon campaign, played from level 1 to level 20 (both character level and dungeon level) - Pathfinder - In-person weekly game - 2009? - 4ish years, we occasionally salted in one shots and short campaigns in other systems to keep from getting burned out of the main campaign Stuff I've Played in the Last Year: Call of Cthulhu Trail of Cthulhu Dungeon World 13th Age Masks Fiasco Stuff I've DM'd in the Last Year: D&D 5E Danger Patrol Fiasco Dungeon Crawl Classic Stuff I want to Play / DM: More Dungeon Crawl Classic LofFP? Dusk City Outlaws (Kickstarter backer) Edit: Blades in the Dark mkultra419 fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jul 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 18:41
|
|
|
Someone should compile these or make a fillable form that matches people together if they want
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 21:51
|
|
|
What are the video games you mention when you want to attract folks to your 4E game? FF Tactics, Tactics Ogre, XCOM, Fire Emblem, that sound about right?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:04
|
|
|
I realize that first sentence doesn't really make sense for most RPG folks out there, but I'd rather gather people who already like tactical combat games than those who'll grudgingly put up with it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:05
|
|
|
Lol tactics ogre is a game from 1995 though I guess they've remade it a million times. Gloomhaven if you want to be hip. I think you got the big ones. Disgaea counts, though please don't make your 4e game anything like Disgaea. Into the Breach did pretty well recently IIRC? It's a genre with a ton of extremely forgettable entries.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:15
|
|
|
I think basically the only tactical RPGs that still make any kind of impact are Fire Emblem ones.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:18
|
|
|
smh at everyone forgetting Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, which is unironically a good game somehow.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:21
|
|
|
There was a psp tactics ogre dumbass
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:25
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:There was a psp tactics ogre dumbass
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:26
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:smh at everyone forgetting Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, which is unironically a good game somehow. making all hit chances 0%, 50%, or 100% was a very good choice that neatly sidesteps the way xcom hit chances gently caress with people's brains
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:38
|
|
|
Haystack posted:Right now I'm running a Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign with my wife and am loving it. I was seriously not expecting to like the system that much, and definitely wasn't expecting my wife to like it. But here we are, planning out an elaborate heroquest that'll resurrect an earth goddess and dislodge a necromancer. How are you handling the GMing side? I like the system but the gm's guide and bestiary aren't out yet so I'd be a little lost. Are you running off the backwards compatibility from older editions, and how do you handle enemies?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 22:52
|
|
|
My Lovely Horse posted:What are the video games you mention when you want to attract folks to your 4E game? FF Tactics, Tactics Ogre, XCOM, Fire Emblem, that sound about right? Unfortunately, probably X-Com. The irony is that I don't think X-Com is an especially good tactics game, but it's both more structurally similar to 4E and more popular than some of the other examples I could give. (Like Into the Breach.)
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:20
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:making all hit chances 0%, 50%, or 100% was a very good choice that neatly sidesteps the way xcom hit chances gently caress with people's brains I mean, no, not really. The real problem was never the psychological feelbads of missing a 45% shot or whatever, the problem is that hit rates below 75% combined with X-Com's lethality results in a game that overpromotes caution, especially for players who haven't learned to ruthlessly abuse explosives yet.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:24
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I mean, no, not really. The real problem was never the psychological feelbads of missing a 45% shot or whatever, the problem is that hit rates below 75% combined with X-Com's lethality results in a game that overpromotes caution, especially for players who haven't learned to ruthlessly abuse explosives yet. no, it's just that xcom has more than one problem. one of those problems is the fact that people tend to think of 85% as "will happen" and 15% as "won't happen"
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:30
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:no, it's just that xcom has more than one problem. one of those problems is the fact that people tend to think of 85% as "will happen" and 15% as "won't happen" I would argue that isn't actually a problem, though. The best reason to introduce slight randomness into a tactics game is to promote short-term planning over long-term planning and create the right conditions for contingency- and "push your luck"-based gameplay, without making the player feel like their decisions don't matter, or making even short-term plans pointless. A high-probability shot should be something that the player plans on happening, and relies on when making other decisions. They plan a bunch of these actions a turn and maybe one or two of them go wrong, but you either cover your rear end with a modest amount of redundancy, or you make a game where a single turn's worth of unexpected setback doesn't break a) the game as a whole (most importantly), and ideally also b) the encounter itself. There's no way to have this and not frustrate people when they miss 85% or 90% shots. It's inevitable. And honestly, that frustration isn't even necessarily bad; it helps provide the reinforcement the player needs in determining how much redundancy and contigency plans are enough, vs. when they should go for broke and make elaborate plans that depend on every step succeeding. It only becomes a problem once you start getting closer to coin-flip range, because then the majority of the gameplay becomes contingency-based -- the only good plans are simple plans with lots of alternate ways to achieve them, which is boring. This problem is exacerbated when a single failed turn has dramatically awful consequences, because then even a small chance of failure is bad for you, and the disincentives for doing cool, flashy poo poo are multiplied. X-Com technically is very hard to lose at the grand strategy level, etc. but the grand strategy game is so shallow and so separate from the combat portion (and the combat portions are long enough) that it's more like you're playing two games and losing one enough times eventually means you lose the other -- even if you win the second one, what you remember is losing a whole bunch. X-Com is also distinct from D&D 4E is that one person is controlling all the units. This makes contingency-based gameplay more appealing / less negative because even if one of your characters misses, you still have a lot of agency left. If a D&D player has to spend his whole turn just covering the possibility that another character's action will whiff, that's much worse, because now they've got almost no agency. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jul 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:45
|
|
|
I think what I'm getting from Tuxedo is that once you get to a point where your troops can get dropped from 100 to 0 in one go, it's a lot less feasible to play the probabilities game not because you THINK 85%=100%, but because you NEED it to be true, since a miss equals death rather than merely a setback/a survivable hit.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:52
|
|
|
also now that i write it out like that i kind of want to make an RPG where there are no to-hit rolls but the GM gets a pool of "actually, that attack misses" points per turn. a few rare player attacks would be completely exempt and others would be more or less expensive in terms of how many Miss Points they cost to cancel.gradenko_2000 posted:I think what I'm getting from Tuxedo is that once you get to a point where your troops can get dropped from 100 to 0 in one go, it's a lot less feasible to play the probabilities game not because you THINK 85%=100%, but because you NEED it to be true, since a miss equals death rather than merely a setback/a survivable hit. yeah, that's a big part of it
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:52
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I would argue that isn't actually a problem, though. The expansion added meld to encourage risky behavior and something to retreat with, but ehhh. Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jul 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:54
|
|
|
Splicer posted:This is where new X-Com doesn't deliver what you're describing. A single missed shot on an alien or lucky hit on a human can and will utterly derail an encounter, especially in the early game. Going from 4 to 3 usually means a wipe if you continue, and since combats are all or nothing if you flee you can't even grab some bodies and weapon fragments as a consolation prize. Exactly. That's why I don't like X-Com very much. It's a good framework for a game, but the numbers are all wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:55
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:also now that i write it out like that i kind of want to make an RPG where there are no to-hit rolls but the GM gets a pool of "actually, that attack misses" points per turn. a few rare player attacks would be completely exempt and others would be more or less expensive in terms of how many Miss Points they cost to cancel. I would absolutely be down to explore a ruleset where attacks always hit, and the variance is in damage and the limited-use abilities that modify damage and force misses It would be a lot easier to manage the attrition game of a D&D-type adventuring day if every encounter actually did yield attrition
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2018 23:58
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I would absolutely be down to explore a ruleset where attacks always hit, and the variance is in damage and the limited-use abilities that modify damage and force misses this is one of the things I want to use in my 4e clone if I ever develop it, all the powers have set damage that the to-hit roll just modify up or down a little
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:01
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:Exactly. That's why I don't like X-Com very much. It's a good framework for a game, but the numbers are all wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:07
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I would argue that isn't actually a problem, though. This is maybe an argument for why it wouldn't be a problem in a different, better, tactics game, but it is in fact a problem in the x-com that actually exists, which is what I was talking about. In that game, the fact that people process high % shots as near-certainties leads to the game screwing people in very unfun ways, as you can see from the fact that like half the gripes about x-com take the form of "I can't believe I missed that crucial 85% shot".
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:19
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:This is maybe an argument for why it wouldn't be a problem in a different, better, tactics game, but it is in fact a problem in the x-com that actually exists, which is what I was talking about. In that game, the fact that people process high % shots as near-certainties leads to the game screwing people in very unfun ways, as you can see from the fact that like half the gripes about x-com take the form of "I can't believe I missed that crucial 85% shot". I disagree. First, the dynamics I'm describing do exist in X-Com. More specifically, every campaign will reach a point, usually in the mid-game, where the probability of missing is low but non-zero, and the player has just enough units to cover their rear end effectively. The lethality of the game downplays this but doesn't negate it completely. This is the most fun part of X-Com and switching to 0 / 50 / 100 would make it worse. Leaving it the same but changing other aspects of the game (crits, accuracy ceilings and floors, etc.) would make it better. Second, even if I were to agree that ~85% shots are pointlessly frustrating in X-Com as-is... 50% shots are more frustrating. The slight psychological difference in expectation vs. reality in the first situation is negligible compared to the "there's no right answer here, it's just down to luck" factor in the second. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jul 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:44
|
|
|
now if you had said "all shots should be either 0 or 100%" then we'd be going places 
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:46
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:This is maybe an argument for why it wouldn't be a problem in a different, better, tactics game, but it is in fact a problem in the x-com that actually exists, which is what I was talking about. In that game, the fact that people process high % shots as near-certainties leads to the game screwing people in very unfun ways, as you can see from the fact that like half the gripes about x-com take the form of "I can't believe I missed that crucial 85% shot". What the gently caress are you talking about? Of course we love to complain about that poo poo. That's part of what makes the game so great! The fact that you soldiers will sometimes whiff, get blown up, and you'll get chain-panic on the rest of your crew is what sets XCOM apart. Those are great moments, as are the moments when you miss a shot and have to execute a heroic rescue on the fly. If you're the sort of person who wants the game to force you to eat poo poo, you can turn on ironman and revel in your failure. If you're the sort of person who goes "hahaha, those dudes got slaughtered, but I don't actually want to lose my colonel," then you can use saves to retry the mission or even save-scum your way through it. People who like XCOM love that tension as you sit there having clicked the button, waiting for the animation to finish so you can find out if you hit or missed. Most of the complaints about Dark Souls come from its difficulty, but its difficulty is also what the people who like it like about it. You're suggesting that XCOM get rid of the thing that XCOM fans like about it in order to try to appeal to the people who don't like it anyway. I don't see how that can possibly be a good idea. It'd be like listening to the people who want a "dark and edgy" Mario game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:53
|
|
|
Maybe they should lower the displayed probability relative to the actual probability on lower difficulties - one of the actual difficult thing is forcing yourself to think about insuring your 85% shots in recognition that you're making hundreds or thousands of shots in a campaign. Showing 65% instead calls attention to the fact that it's not a guarantee. That way, you're used to it and don't stop doing it when it's 85% either. I'm sure this is anathema to many people but I think it'd work!! The cheap substitute is making your shots actually start at a lower accuracy and scale difficulty appropriately but that seems a little harsh and scaling the difficulty is at least non-trivial. I think 85% is a particularly bad "teaching" accuracy in that sense even if I'm fine with 85% shots in general. It'd be figured out and ruined immediately of course but you know, those early adopters would learn. Crits I just really don't like. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jul 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:57
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe they should lower the displayed probability relative to the actual probability on lower difficulties - some of the real difficult thing is forcing yourself to think about insuring your 85% shots in recognition that you're making hundreds or thousands of shots in a campaign. Showing 65% instead calls attention to the fact that it's not a guarantee so that you're used to it and don't stop doing it when it's 85%. I'm sure this is anathema to many people but I think it'd work!! The cheap substitute is making your shots actually start at a lower accuracy and scale difficulty appropriately but that seems a little harsh and scaling the difficulty is at least non-trivial. That would make ~50% shots seem way riskier than they actually are.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 00:59
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I disagree. This doesn't make sense at all? In either case it's down to luck, but with 50% shots the player is much more aware of that and more likely to plan appropriately. Building a game around high-probability shots don't reduce the impact of luck, it just means that (if your game is otherwise balanced) the impact of luck will be found in rarer-but-worse bad events, which are generally more frustrating for players. I would be fine with "all shots are either 0 or 100%", but if you're gonna have some random shots, 50% is the way to go. Jimbozig posted:What the gently caress are you talking about? Of course we love to complain about that poo poo. That's part of what makes the game so great! The fact that you soldiers will sometimes whiff, get blown up, and you'll get chain-panic on the rest of your crew is what sets XCOM apart. Those are great moments, as are the moments when you miss a shot and have to execute a heroic rescue on the fly. If you're the sort of person who wants the game to force you to eat poo poo, you can turn on ironman and revel in your failure. If you're the sort of person who goes "hahaha, those dudes got slaughtered, but I don't actually want to lose my colonel," then you can use saves to retry the mission or even save-scum your way through it. I don't *think* the primary market for x-com is people who find blackjack intensely entertaining, but I agree that fixing this particular problem would be bad for those people
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:01
|
|
|
King of Solomon posted:That would make ~50% shots seem way riskier than they actually are. Well I wouldn't do it uniformly - it'd be by a smaller amount the closer you got to 50%, which itself would stay 50%, and then no scaling below that. The equivalent for values under 50% would actually be *increasing* displayed probabilities which I think is unfair in a way that decreasing them is not.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:02
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Building a game around high-probability shots don't reduce the impact of luck  Think about it, if all shots were 99% accurate, luck would play a part, but that part would be miniscule. If all shots were 1%, luck would play a part, but that part would be miniscule. The role of luck increases the closer you get to 50/50. The probability of the shot also has nothing to do with how bad the consequences of missing are -- they're two separate things that interact, yes, but they are in fact separate. e: It's true that decreasing one is one way to balance increasing the other, but you don't have to -- there are a million other ways to do that. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Jul 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:07
|
|
|
King of Solomon posted:That would make ~50% shots seem way riskier than they actually are. I believe XCOM 2 actually does. Your chances to hit are higher than displayed, and the aliens' chances to hit are lower than displayed; and both are adjusted for sequences of misses or hits respectively. (It also buffers several rolls ahead to prevent save scumming to beat the RNG.)
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:10
|
|
|
Deliberately feeding the player false information about something as simple as probability to hit is a comically awful idea. i mean, i'll do an analysis on why if you really want me to, but jesus christ  hyphz posted:I believe XCOM 2 actually does. Your chances to hit are higher than displayed, and the aliens' chances to hit are lower than displayed; and both are adjusted for sequences of misses or hits respectively. (It also buffers several rolls ahead to prevent save scumming to beat the RNG.) lol loving firaxis giving the player a boost after a series of misses is actually a pretty good idea (less for psychological reasons, more for the sake of blunting unwanted outliers) but, like, you should show the player exactly how it works in explicit terms so that they can use it on purpose, just like any other aspect of the game Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jul 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:11
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:
Maybe this would have made more sense to you if you hadn't clipped out the surrounding words? Yes, obviously if you kept everything the same and ramped up the hit chance you would decrease the role of luck. But you can choose how much of an impact you want luck to have independently of hit chances - roughly speaking, it's the chance of failure times the probability of failure. So if you want luck to have a certain specific amount of importance in your game, building your game around higher hit chances requires more severe consequences for failure.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:17
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe they should lower the displayed probability relative to the actual probability on lower difficulties lying to the players is extremely bad advice if you were the GM in a TRPG and is also bad as a computer game hyphz posted:I believe XCOM 2 actually does. Your chances to hit are higher than displayed, and the aliens' chances to hit are lower than displayed; and both are adjusted for sequences of misses or hits respectively. (It also buffers several rolls ahead to prevent save scumming to beat the RNG.) not exactly true. The easier difficulties give you an undisplayed buff to your hit chance if you miss, which resets when you hit, but the Normal difficulty and onwards is completely honest
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:17
|
|
|
incidentally, Jimbozig, that's one of my favorite things about Strike! (for context: every time you miss in Strike!, you get a token that lets you add +1 to another roll. you can save these up during a combat and spend them all at once to guarantee a hit, or just sprinkle them around to up the odds. it adds a bunch of meaningful decisions for relatively little overhead)
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:18
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:lying to the players is extremely bad advice if you were the GM in a TRPG and is also bad as a computer game I think this page has a full discussion, but it claims: https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comments/45u81x/yes_xcom_2s_rng_cheats_in_your_favor_heres_how/ * Rookie Difficulty: XCOM hit chance is *1.2 what is shown as long as what is shown is greater than 50%; each missed XCOM shot gives a +10% bonus to shots with >50% base chance in that turn; each hit alien shot gives aliens a -10% penalty to shots in that turn; for each soldier lost below 4, XCOM gets +15% hit chance and aliens get -10%. Bonuses can't go above 95%; * Veteran Difficulty: XCOM hit chance is *1.1 what is shown as long as what is shown is greater than 50%; each missed XCOM shot gives a +10% bonus to shots with >50% base chance in that turn; for each soldier lost below 4, XCOM gets +10% hit chance and aliens get -10%; * Commander Difficulty: Each missed XCOM shot gives a +15% bonus to shots with >50% base chance in that turn; * Legend Difficulty: No modifiers. It's basically the GM fudging rolls.  It probably is a terrible idea, but look at what happened to Chaos Reborn which used honest probabilities throughout and had people throwing their mice in frustration to the extent they had to add a non-random mode.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:23
|
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Maybe this would have made more sense to you if you hadn't clipped out the surrounding words? Yes, obviously if you kept everything the same and ramped up the hit chance you would decrease the role of luck. But you can choose how much of an impact you want luck to have independently of hit chances - roughly speaking, it's the chance of failure times the probability of failure. So if you want luck to have a certain specific amount of importance in your game, building your game around higher hit chances requires more severe consequences for failure. I may have muddled the issue by using "impact" to mean two different things, and that's my bad, I should have been more precise with my terms. That said, luck is a by-product here. I don't want luck to have a certain specific amount of importance in my game -- what I want is to decrease the utility of multi-turn planning, and to increase the number and depth of decisions you make during a given turn. Luck is just a tool to get there.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 17:53 |
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I may have muddled the issue by using "impact" to mean two different things, and that's my bad, I should have been more precise with my terms. You still face the same basic issue: if you want misses to introduce fuzziness, the consequence of misses will need to be bigger the less likely they are.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2018 01:27
|
|