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Tuxedo Catfish posted:and if you insist, i'm gonna play the guy who does lots of "little" multi-attacks and break your game in half The fact that TTRPG designers usually gently caress up the math on their games doesn't mean it's impossible! The worst is when they do it by creating the most unimaginative feats possible. Your choices: you can do this awesome thing that is super cool but only comes up rarely, or you can get +1 to every attack you make ever.
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May 6, 2022 07:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The nWoD / Storyteller system is like Monopoly: if you don't play by the rules, it's an excruciating mess where nothing works and eventually you just give up and (quit / ignore everything except the core Xd10 resolution system).
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May 6, 2022 07:52
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Tulip posted:So uh, how many games fall into this that aren't DnD? Like I can think of some but they're already FATAL&Friends candidates before you even get to balance issues so it's kind of beating a dead horse. Basically no RPGs that I've played in the last two decades have felt like this was a real problem. Oh as long as there's OSR and retroclones, there will be ding-dongs lining up to make the same basic game mistakes of the 70s and 80s forever. And they'll call knowing the difference between the functional and broken parts of the game system mastery and be proud of themselves for reading.
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May 6, 2022 08:35
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Correct, the point of vampire is that landlords are bad. 
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May 6, 2022 08:41
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Arivia posted:I'm presuming this was CtL, was it 1e or 2e? I know 2e is infamous for that poo poo. 2e, yeah, though my experience with 1e doesn't exactly knock it out of the water. Also yeah to echo what other people have said, running Werewolf was also an exercise in flicking through the book and I hated the Condition system at first sight. Which probably didn't help.
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May 6, 2022 08:55
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PerniciousKnid posted:What about using the minute hand of a clock instead of dice? "You swing your sword, it's... 9:01, you drop the sword and get run through." you could use the ones-digit of the seconds read-out of a digital clock/watch to drive d10 rolls
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May 6, 2022 09:23
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I do get the impression the trick to running most WoD games is to have GM notes that amount to rewriting the rulebook in actually readable fashion.
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May 6, 2022 10:23
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Tulip posted:So uh, how many games fall into this that aren't DnD? Like I can think of some but they're already FATAL&Friends candidates before you even get to balance issues so it's kind of beating a dead horse. Basically no RPGs that I've played in the last two decades have felt like this was a real problem. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:12 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 11:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:you could use the ones-digit of the seconds read-out of a digital clock/watch to drive d10 rolls Isn't using the hundreds of a second parts of a stopwatch already a thing for randomization? Just have the player press stop and count it from there, much quicker than seconds or minutes and won't hold up the game while players wait 15 minutes for the perfect result.
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May 6, 2022 11:14
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Splicer posted:The make one attack vs make two attacks problem is always going to fall down that hole if players can spend character creation resources to add riders to attacks. Character A can make one attack but character B can make one weaker attack and then apply damage to a second person/take a specific unmodifiable action etc - fine, because anything that boosts your attacks will work the same for each character. If character B can just "make two attacks" then it's going to get messy fast. To avoid that problem, those sorts of feats and player options should be class-specific. The thing that really makes all of this impossible is having to constantly release new books. Even if you get the balance right the first time (and most crunchy games don't), you will eventually gently caress it up worse and worse as time goes on.
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May 6, 2022 13:21
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Correct, the point of vampire is that landlords are bad. Splicer posted:The make one attack vs make two attacks problem is always going to fall down that hole if players can spend character creation resources to add riders to attacks. Character A can make one attack but character B can make one weaker attack and then apply damage to a second person/take a specific unmodifiable action etc - fine, because anything that boosts your attacks will work the same for each character. If character B can just "make two attacks" then it's going to get messy fast. I mean, it's also worth noting that many games, such as 3rd Edition DnD aka the poster child for borked hostile math in an RPG, have defenses that apply on a per-attack basis. In a game that does have a lot of charop cuz it's very much DnD but I wouldn't describe as fundamentally borked, LANCER, spamming lots of little attacks with rider is an option but it isn't intrinsically the best method, there are very valid reasons to use haymaker weapons. Not saying it isn't messy but there's a million and one video games where high attack speed low damage vs low attack speed high damage isn't just a simple "high attack speed lo damage is always better." It isn't an underlying outcome of the math of the universe, it's several specific cases of specific designers making specific decisions. Nessus posted:I don't think many games other than PF/D&D have the mixture of sufficiently rigorous turn layout (in theory anyway) and sufficiently crunchy mechanics to make this possible. The only other one I can think of is Exalted and part of the idea of Exalted is, yeah, you found out the pitchfork has broken stats, now you're gonna develop Ultimate Pitchfork Media Style. Makes sense. My main group ran Exalted while I was unavailable to game for a while and they're all traumatized by it. They like its ideas but considered the math and dice rolling to be a top level nightmare. theironjef posted:Oh as long as there's OSR and retroclones, there will be ding-dongs lining up to make the same basic game mistakes of the 70s and 80s forever. And they'll call knowing the difference between the functional and broken parts of the game system mastery and be proud of themselves for reading. lol To some extent it does kind of rule to watch somebody step on rakes not out of blindness or confusion but out of a belief that the rake stepping was part of what made things they liked in childhood work. And unlike when this happens in like medicine or war, there's basically no consequences.
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May 6, 2022 13:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:you could use the ones-digit of the seconds read-out of a digital clock/watch to drive d10 rolls But I want the players to spend 20 minutes trying to plausibly stall the big bag guy in negotiations before frantically trying to kill him before the time runs out.
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May 6, 2022 14:34
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This discussion of many confusingly set-up alternatives reminds me of Cory Doctorow's recent blog post about health insurance: The eye-glazing scam of Medicare drug plansquote:Here's a key lesson from Lovell's book [, "How to Cheat at Everything"]: "complexity in a proposition bet is only there to make it harder for you to figure out the odds." In other words, if a grifter at a bar tells you that they'll pay you 3:1 if you can do X, and 5:1 if you can do Y, and 9:1 if you can do X and Y, all of those different payouts are solely there to confuse you.
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May 6, 2022 14:58
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PerniciousKnid posted:But I want the players to spend 20 minutes trying to plausibly stall the big bag guy in negotiations before frantically trying to kill him before the time runs out. lol ok this rules, i wouldn't want to do it for my personal table since we take tons of breaks for notes and kids and bathroom, but for a con this sounds fantastic
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May 6, 2022 15:02
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Jimbozig posted:To avoid that problem, those sorts of feats and player options should be class-specific. Jimbozig posted:The thing that really makes all of this impossible is having to constantly release new books. Even if you get the balance right the first time (and most crunchy games don't), you will eventually gently caress it up worse and worse as time goes on. Tulip posted:I mean, it's also worth noting that many games, such as 3rd Edition DnD aka the poster child for borked hostile math in an RPG, have defenses that apply on a per-attack basis. In a game that does have a lot of charop cuz it's very much DnD but I wouldn't describe as fundamentally borked, LANCER, spamming lots of little attacks with rider is an option but it isn't intrinsically the best method, there are very valid reasons to use haymaker weapons. Like Lancer has multi-target weapons but it doesn't (to my knowledge) have a mech that lets you shoot twice as many weapons a round as everyone else. Barrage is available to everyone and comes at a cost and stuff like integrated weapons are of the "take a specific unmodifiable action" type I talked about earlier. Fake edit sidenote: There's a whole bunch of reasons why videogame system design varies from TT system design but probably the easiest and most applicable one is videogames do all the math for you, so they can use more complex math to keep everything balanced. "+10% damage" or "Chance to stun on hit, stun chance varies with the number of enemies hit" is trivial for a videogame to apply and work around corner cases for but would be an absolute nightmare at the table. "Messy" isn't nearly as big an issue when it's not all having to funnel through a human brain during play, and you can patch away busted stuff every couple of months. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:30 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 15:28
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What if crunchy games leaned into and accepted "PHB + 1", not as an excuse, but as a first principle?
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May 6, 2022 15:45
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CitizenKeen posted:What if crunchy games leaned into and accepted "PHB + 1", not as an excuse, but as a first principle? This could work if it's "core rules + setting book" and the settings don't mesh, but for a game that has a singular premise, it'd surely fall apart at the table as soon as Alice wants to play an Axe Mage and Bob wants to play a Thief With A Dog and those classes/specialisations/ability chains/etc are in different supplements but both are in genre?
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May 6, 2022 15:52
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1st Stage Midboss posted:This could work if it's "core rules + setting book" and the settings don't mesh, but for a game that has a singular premise, it'd surely fall apart at the table as soon as Alice wants to play an Axe Mage and Bob wants to play a Thief With A Dog and those classes/specialisations/ability chains/etc are in different supplements but both are in genre? Just don't allow it, then. If you're going to have ever-expansive character options, and you want to have meaningfully focused games out of it, then you need to legitimate (and provide guidance for) restricting the options to fit with any particular game.
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May 6, 2022 15:55
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I am the target audience for splat bloat. give me the billion character options
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May 6, 2022 15:58
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1st Stage Midboss posted:This could work if it's "core rules + setting book" and the settings don't mesh, but for a game that has a singular premise, it'd surely fall apart at the table as soon as Alice wants to play an Axe Mage and Bob wants to play a Thief With A Dog and those classes/specialisations/ability chains/etc are in different supplements but both are in genre? PHB + 1 is traditionally a character limit, not a campaign limit. So Alice can play with PHB + Tome of the Blade Wizards and Bob can play with PHB + The Underhanded Petmaster's Handbook.
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May 6, 2022 16:07
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Splicer posted:I'm walking back a bit because I reread what Halloween Jack was saying and now realise he was arguing against the concept of any kind of specialising into multiple target damage, including like AOE. I thought we were talking about situations where "I attack, and then I do that again" is a purchasable character option. There is a lot of overlap, and it is still very possible to screw up things like multi-target weaponry, but it's not the cold hard certainty I was talking about. Even if the DPS is perfectly balanced between them, it won't be once you consider multiple attacks, crit-expanding feats, special damage that doesn't double on a crit, and on and on. And more player options from supplements can only make it worse. This kinda speaks to a philosophical question about what people want D&D to be. Do we care about touches of realism, or is this a wuxia game where all weapons should be an equally valid tactical choice? Like, should throwing knives and whips be situational weapons, or something you can base a Fighter build around?
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May 6, 2022 16:18
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The houserule I used to play around with back when I had any interest in fixing D&D was always something like "As a martial, you can use either hand for either attack or defense in melee. If your hand is full of weapon, you get a D10 damage. If your other hand is full of weapon, 2D10. For each hand that's full of defense thing instead of weapon (shield, cloak, parrying dagger) you get an AC bonus instead." The idea was basically just that I didn't wanna fuckin' hear about dual-wielding vs. two handers or anything ever again. I've seen other games do it successfully, but of course it wouldn't work in D20 products because the loot fidelity is part of the point. People want there to be a smart weapon to pick and a host of worse ones so they can feel like experts for knowing not to take a tulwar.
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May 6, 2022 16:28
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If people learn nothing else from Into the Odd, Troika!, and the like, they should learn that character options are worldbuilding.
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May 6, 2022 16:30
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Hell yeah my Ukrainian terminators arrived. Three weeks from when the Ukrainian postal service stopped tracking until it hit Royal Mail and they delivered it today. Intact. Well cast and cleaned up a bit too. Tortuga Bay Miniatures are cool.
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May 6, 2022 16:46
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Halloween Jack posted:This kinda speaks to a philosophical question about what people want D&D to be. Do we care about touches of realism, or is this a wuxia game where all weapons should be an equally valid tactical choice? Like, should throwing knives and whips be situational weapons, or something you can base a Fighter build around? I was half going to reply with this to jimbozig's post about how options that feel different can be more or less effective against different enemies. That would work in a strategic game, but it doesn't work so well in an RPG because in practice you only get to make that choice once with no knowledge of what's coming up. If the GM is tailoring encounters to the PCs, then this isn't so much a mathematical or tactical choice as a choice of what you want to spend time playing out. If you're doing a module or otherwise the encounters aren't being adjusted, the best option is always the most general. This is made even worse by the fact that in most RPGs the "reward" for an encounter that your build is optimised for is not to get to spend time being awesome, but for the encounter to end quickly.
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May 6, 2022 17:44
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Halloween Jack posted:This is my fault for muddling different examples together. Jimbozig was talking about multiattacks, but the specific example I wanted to drill down on was the dice math of base weapon damage. Like in 3e you can take a longsword (d8, crits 19-20 for x2), a battleaxe (d8, crits 20 for x3) or rapier (d6, crits 18-20 for x2).
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May 6, 2022 19:04
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CitizenKeen posted:What if crunchy games leaned into and accepted "PHB + 1", not as an excuse, but as a first principle? The problem is that crunchy games that actually do produce a ton of expansion books in this day and age tend to be complete kitchen sink settings with multiple areas where characters can be customized, and the most generic (and probably the least interestingly designed, given how long it takes to really figure out how to design for a system) options are going to be the ones in the core rulebook. Say I'm playing Pathfinder 2e. I want to play a Catfolk because I don't want to play something as generic fantasy as the humans and elves in the core book, and I want to play a Gunslinger because they seem neat. But that doesn't work with a PBH + 1 system, and with the way Paizo releases books it will never work without limiting things in a way that ruins the fun of making a kitchen sink system that's constantly adding fun new mechanical options. Maybe it would work if the PHB is really an SRD or the like that you're shuffling mechanical options that won't affect things too much into, but that's not the model people are using now and "only take options from one book" would still be an extremely easy rule for groups to ignore. On the plus side, crunchy games that produce a ton of expansion books don't really get made any more so this won't be a problem most of the time. Either you're D&D, you're one of the few big publishers that could make a game with that many books if they wanted to like Pelgrane or Paizo, or your game had the right mix of advantages to actually blow up like Lancer. Otherwise games are lucky if they get more than one expansion book at that scale in the first place.
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May 6, 2022 19:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This discussion of many confusingly set-up alternatives reminds me of Cory Doctorow's recent blog post about health insurance: The eye-glazing scam of Medicare drug plans i've tried to explain this to people in the context of MMO currencies many times and they always look at me like i've grown a second head. nice to know someone's out there formalizing it
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May 6, 2022 20:22
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i've tried to explain this to people in the context of MMO currencies many times and they always look at me like i've grown a second head. nice to know someone's out there formalizing it Those fools! The second head is for catching scammers!
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May 6, 2022 20:24
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Lurks With Wolves posted:The problem is that crunchy games that actually do produce a ton of expansion books in this day and age tend to be complete kitchen sink settings with multiple areas where characters can be customized, and the most generic (and probably the least interestingly designed, given how long it takes to really figure out how to design for a system) options are going to be the ones in the core rulebook. Say I'm playing Pathfinder 2e. I want to play a Catfolk because I don't want to play something as generic fantasy as the humans and elves in the core book, and I want to play a Gunslinger because they seem neat. But that doesn't work with a PBH + 1 system, and with the way Paizo releases books it will never work without limiting things in a way that ruins the fun of making a kitchen sink system that's constantly adding fun new mechanical options. Maybe it would work if the PHB is really an SRD or the like that you're shuffling mechanical options that won't affect things too much into, but that's not the model people are using now and "only take options from one book" would still be an extremely easy rule for groups to ignore. (1) Fine, PHB + 2. Or 3. I don't care. The point I'm making is, if a constant churn of splats will inevitably make for a broken and unbalanced game, why not just expect designers to balance against some defined-size subset, and limit players to choosing from that subset. (2) You can find out real quick if a player wants to be a Catfolk because they think cats are cool, or because Feline Acrobatics pairs well with Gunslinger's Footing by just letting them reskin. You want to be a catfolk? Use elven stats, rename Elven Grace (or whatever) to Feline Grace, bob's your uncle. You're a cat. You're back to PHB + 1. I've run plenty of games with huge amounts of splats where I've limited the players to some subset of the books, and allowing a player to create a concept they like has never been a problem. It's always revealed to be a problem because half the time the real reason they want to be Goliath Sailor/Runepriest isn't because of their cool backstory/premise, but some broken combination of feats. When you offer them a reskinned option that gets them where they want to be - narratively - players are either excited to find a solution, or suddenly "grumble grumble I guess I can be a dwarven fighter..."
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May 6, 2022 20:25
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honestly i like that powerful mechanical combinations lead the player to narrative combinations they might not have come up with on their own not as much as i like games that are feature complete in one book and give content treadmills the middle finger, though, so i'm not actually gonna argue  e: also "GM may I" is the most nefarious part of that ask because the whole point is creativity within restrictions. if you're just asking the GM to wave away one of the restrictions the fun's gone
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May 6, 2022 20:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:honestly i like that powerful mechanical combinations lead the player to narrative combinations they might not have come up with on their own Yeah that's kind of every character I've made in any even slightly crunchier system since I tend to start with the mechanics first and then flesh out the character from there
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May 6, 2022 20:35
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GURPS' core is already 2 books and it works fine, yeah.
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May 6, 2022 22:32
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Hel posted:Isn't using the hundreds of a second parts of a stopwatch already a thing for randomization? Just have the player press stop and count it from there, much quicker than seconds or minutes and won't hold up the game while players wait 15 minutes for the perfect result. oh, that's really clever. Another way to get random numbers is think of a number from one to ten (or w/e) and ask for the same from the player - and them together and make it roll over (so, 7 plus 6 equals a roll of 3 on a d10, 9+2 =1).
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May 6, 2022 23:22
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CitizenKeen posted:What if crunchy games leaned into and accepted "PHB + 1", not as an excuse, but as a first principle? The downside is: Lurks With Wolves posted:Catfolk and Gunslinger are in different books
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May 6, 2022 23:28
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Splicer posted:Well let's say "Core" instead of PHB. If this is being done as an actual design principle rather than an excuse then what we're saying is core is fully internally consistent/balanced/whatever, and any new releases are only guaranteed to be internally consistent with core. The point of this is to be able to release new content while still having a realistic chance of providing your players with a meaningfully curated and balanced play experience. I still think it's better to just provide tools to build your own interesting campaign subsets rather than the AL route.
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May 6, 2022 23:32
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sebmojo posted:oh, that's really clever.
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May 6, 2022 23:37
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hyphz posted:That would work in a strategic game, but it doesn't work so well in an RPG because in practice you only get to make that choice once with no knowledge of what's coming up. That doesn't have to be the case, necessarily. If the GM has prepared the session as a series of encounters to be overcome in combat then sure. If an encounter has many potential outcomes including "we sneak around it" "we negotiate with it" "we lure it into a trap" alongside "we murderise it", all with their own advantages and disadvantages that need to be weighted against one another, and if encounters can be scouted ahead of time, then the party's build being ill-suited or well-suited to a particular enemy type is just another thing to factor in to those strategic decisions.
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May 6, 2022 23:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:honestly i like that powerful mechanical combinations lead the player to narrative combinations they might not have come up with on their own Yeah, like once. After that it just becomes an assumed part of the story of optimal characters going forward. All "Yeah, much like most paladins I took a warlock dip because I uhhhh something fey patron something something dedicated warrior."
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May 6, 2022 23:57
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Splicer posted:People are awful at picking randomly though. You'll end up with a bunch of 7s. yeah but it's random plus random. so if they keep picking 7 but I change my number each time, the result will be random. it's good for email gaming, and it's a fun kind of rock paper scissors game since they can try and suss out patterns in your number picking.
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May 6, 2022 23:57
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