Could you base a d&d campaign in the 1800's what do you think.
K_O_...@webtv.net
With usual (Unless it's +1 that monster wont be hit! Natural 20 of
course always hits). But anyway the cost of ammo could be high. limited
supply. How would you make a gun crazed D&D world based in the lawless
1800's fair?
GoldRushG
>1800's fair?
Make sure all the PCs have guns? :/
Mark @ Gold Rush Games ICQ: #9614976; http://members.aol.com/goldrushg
San Angelo: City of Heroes nominated for Origins Award - Best RPG Supplement!
Usagi Yojimbo RPG nominated for Origins Award - Best RPG!
Dragonscroll
K_O_...@webtv.net wrote:
> Could it work? Guns of course come to mind in this sort of campaign.
> With usual (Unless it's +1 that monster wont be hit! Natural 20 of
> course always hits). But anyway the cost of ammo could be high.
limited
> 1800's fair?
I recommend taking a good look at the Call of Cthulhu system for
information on this. It has a surprising array of guns and the game
still manages to be very, very unfair AGAINST the players - mainly
because the "monsters" of this game can generally laugh off shots that
would certainly kill a man, or at least use their supernatural powers in
such a way as to make the gun a moot weapon.
Guns in any genre are extremely deadly - to a human. So if you are
planning to have the PCs up against humans primarily, here are some
suggestions:
1. Make the guns in the game very inaccurate (this is somewhat
historically accurate) and apply to-hit penalties.
2. Give the "law" a heavy presence in the game, such that shooting
someone cannot be easily done without being arrested.
3. Modify your system similar to Call of Cthulhu where the damage a gun
does decreases with range.
Any other ideas?
James
Dragonscroll
--
Dragonscroll is your source for fantasy, sci fi and RPGs at 20-40% off!
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--== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==--
---Share what you know. Learn what you don't.---
L. MacQuarrie
Gazeteer, I think) - it's an AD&D game set in the 1800's,
with new character classes, extensive gun rules, and
a backdrop of secret societies. Yes, guns can be *very*
deadly....
Sidhain
have the likes of villainsous secret societies, Dracula, other vampires etc.
The game actually shows just how flexible AD&D can be creating a good horror
environment (which is far better than standard Ravenloft.--The modules were
fantastic, the world just lacked the feel of the modules and made itself
into a sort of Dark Forgotten Realms but I digress.) The MoRD world is
Horror, it has much in vain with the entire era of "gothic" novels (and no I
don't mean the modern pseudo goth stories) but such things as Varnae the
Vampire, Dracula, The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide, The Invisible
Man etc...and the original Camarilla story (guess what you people of WW
interest the Camarilla is stolen from a vampire story that predates gaming
by many many years, hell Vampires predate WW purile dreck.)
lam...@my-dejanews.com
Dragonscroll <c...@dragonscroll.com> wrote:
> In article <2677-37...@newsd-141.iap.bryant.webtv.net>,
> K_O_...@webtv.net wrote:
> > With usual (Unless it's +1 that monster wont be hit! Natural 20 of
> > course always hits). But anyway the cost of ammo could be high.
> limited
> > supply. How would you make a gun crazed D&D world based in the
lawless
> > 1800's fair?
>
> information on this. It has a surprising array of guns and the game
> still manages to be very, very unfair AGAINST the players - mainly
> because the "monsters" of this game can generally laugh off shots that
> would certainly kill a man, or at least use their supernatural powers
in
> such a way as to make the gun a moot weapon.
>
> Guns in any genre are extremely deadly - to a human. So if you are
> planning to have the PCs up against humans primarily, here are some
> suggestions:
Other than rate of fire black powder guns are no deadlier than longbows
or crossbows. If you buy the D&D hit point system the only reason to
make guns deadlier is that modern perceptions say they are deadlier.
Guns are low accuracy, and low reliability unless you are using sealed
brass cartrige amunition, which dependes on the year in the 1800's.
> 1. Make the guns in the game very inaccurate (this is somewhat
> historically accurate) and apply to-hit penalties.
>
> 2. Give the "law" a heavy presence in the game, such that shooting
> someone cannot be easily done without being arrested.
>
> 3. Modify your system similar to Call of Cthulhu where the damage a
gun
> does decreases with range.
Some range penalty is a requirement.
DougL
Brandon Blackmoor
Hash: SHA1
Sidhain wrote in message
<7hn20e$9u0$1...@ash.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
>
>Man etc...and the original Camarilla story (guess what you people
of WW
>interest the Camarilla is stolen from a vampire story that predates
gaming
>by many many years, hell Vampires predate WW purile dreck.)
Are you by any chance referring to Carmilla? "Carmilla" is the name
of a vampire (one of the first of the modern "bad girls", actually).
"Camarilla" is a word referring to a secret cabal (
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?db=web1913&term=Camarilla&c
onfig=define ).
BBlackmoor
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m
regardless of the game system or era. just as the longsword is
available in a shop on the street in a typical dnd world, so would
guns in a 19th century setting. this would mean that not only pc's
would be armed with guns, but npc's would have equal chances to be so
armed. in fact, if you chose to make them rare it wouldn't matter, as
long as the ease or difficulty in aquiring them is the same for all,
and not just a privilege of the pc's. that is one form of balance.
combat balance is a seperate issue. if you apply the same damage
rolls for the gun as for a sword, you maintain balance without
changing a thing. if you don't find this palatable, you can increase
the damage of the gun in step with increases in toughness in the
beastiary. this has the same effect, but feels different. if this
remains unacceptable, then you must consider changing the balance of
the game. if the gun is viewed as a superior weapon, then as the
effectiveness increases, so does the difficulty in managing combat
balance.
mike
lam...@my-dejanews.com
m wrote:
> fairness is generally based on equality. this would seem to be true
> regardless of the game system or era. just as the longsword is
> available in a shop on the street in a typical dnd world, so would
> guns in a 19th century setting. this would mean that not only pc's
> would be armed with guns, but npc's would have equal chances to be so
> armed. in fact, if you chose to make them rare it wouldn't matter, as
> long as the ease or difficulty in aquiring them is the same for all,
> and not just a privilege of the pc's. that is one form of balance.
> combat balance is a seperate issue. if you apply the same damage
> rolls for the gun as for a sword, you maintain balance without
> changing a thing. if you don't find this palatable, you can increase
> the damage of the gun in step with increases in toughness in the
> beastiary. this has the same effect, but feels different. if this
> remains unacceptable, then you must consider changing the balance of
> the game. if the gun is viewed as a superior weapon, then as the
> effectiveness increases, so does the difficulty in managing combat
> balance.
American Civil War casulties ran about 6 to 1 wounded to killed.
If you assume the average soldier is level zero or level one, with
average con, what does that say about gun damage? Sounds like a
single die two could be too high! A die eight is probably far too
high.
Of course real casulties are disabled and/or in nead of medical care
long before you get to a mortal wound, but that is just as true with
the long sword, and ACW battlefield surgery is little better than
Roman Republic battlefield surgery so it is just as much of a
problem either way.
There is no good reason to give guns a damage even close to that of
a long sword. Over the course of a minute a long sword at short range
can do far more damage to an unarmored foe than one black powder
bullet. (Well, actually they can both kill you dead dead dead, but
the sword could go on to inflict another half dozen mortal wounds
after the first.)
In practice the use of guns (which seem familiar) breaks suspension
of disbelief in the D&D hit point system for some people, but that
problem is there with arrows and falls in the normal game, some
people are simply able to ignore it there.
m
1880's and 90's when more reliable cartridge ammunition and better
firearms - maybe most especially repeating rifles - made guns far more
deadly than in the civil war. the exponential increase in the
technology would make the selection of era a very important decision.
mike
Kerry Harrison
With usual (Unless it's +1 that monster wont be hit! Natural 20 of
course always hits). But anyway the cost of ammo could be high. limited
supply. How would you make a gun crazed D&D world based in the lawless
1800's fair?
Yeah, but I think you'd be better off using the Alternity rules for such a
campaign myself.
Kerry
lam...@my-dejanews.com
m wrote:
> you have some good points. i suppose i was thinking of more like the
> 1880's and 90's when more reliable cartridge ammunition and better
> firearms - maybe most especially repeating rifles - made guns far more
> deadly than in the civil war. the exponential increase in the
> technology would make the selection of era a very important decision.
[SNIP]
Even then, look at the wounds to kills rate for other actions, or for
modern urban life. Heavy machine gun bullets are still quite often
survived. If I go down to the local court-house and read the citations
on the walls I can find people who fought on heroically and effectively
with three or four bullet wounds from heavy rifles or machine guns.
Maybe they were level 2 fighters with above average con.
Seriously, a high powered modern fire arm is probably still only a d4
or so per bullet in D&D terms.
There is a problem with rate of fire, I can put out a lot of shots in
a one minute round. If this is a problem shorten the round to six
seconds or so. Or remember that large amounts of high caliber ammo is
heavy and awkward to carry.
Look in standard D&D a relatively low level fighter, bound and
helpless, is many minutes work for a headsman with an axe. This is
because all the weapons are scaled to kill a level one fighter in
light armor at a not unreasonable rate. It breaks down in other
situations UNLESS you accept that it is just the will of the gods,
or a law of nature, that hero's are amazingly resistant to damage.
Apply this same logic to guns, their effectiveness should be scaled
to make them match reality against a level one fighter who is skilled
at ducking and taking cover, or against a level zero who is just
standing there. Thus they should be likely, but NOT sure kills
against a level zero with one damage roll. i.e. a die four or so.
Of course if you do not shorten the combat round the dozen or so
bullets I put in the air still add up to a lot of ranged damage, this
is like giving everyone a high level wizards magic missiles spell,
reusable (Except that it does not work vs monsters who are imune
to non magic damage). And this results in some balance problems unless
you give the orks guns of their own, and insist that non humaniod
monsters who ARE vulnerable to guns all have high move silently and
hide in shadows skills.
wretc...@my-dejanews.com
lam...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> Seriously, a high powered modern fire arm is probably still only a d4
> or so per bullet in D&D terms.
Unless those bullets happen to be Black Talon...
Brandon Blackmoor
Hash: SHA1
wretc...@my-dejanews.com wrote in message
<7ih0g9$qke$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>
>Unless those bullets happen to be Black Talon...
If a cartridge or a weapon became more lethal by being vilified by
the media and politicians, the Black Talon, the Uzi, and the AK-47
would be the deadliest weapons on Earth.
In the real world, Black Talon rounds are not magic, and aren't
significantly more or less lethal than any other frangible or
hollowpoint round.
A good resource for ballistic information is
http://www.greent.com/40Page/front.htm .
BBlackmoor
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nos...@myplace.net
>
>wretc...@my-dejanews.com wrote in message <7ih0g9$qke$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>>
>>Unless those bullets happen to be Black Talon...
>
>If a cartridge or a weapon became more lethal by being vilified by
>the media and politicians, the Black Talon, the Uzi, and the AK-47
>would be the deadliest weapons on Earth.
>
>In the real world, Black Talon rounds are not magic, and aren't
>significantly more or less lethal than any other frangible or
>hollowpoint round.
For years now we've made jokes about a "Hollywood RPG", where the damage
a weapon did was based entirely on its reputation: A Katana or Shuriken
would do lots and lots of damage, much like the weapons cited above...
wretc...@my-deja.com
nos...@myplace.net wrote:
> For years now we've made jokes about a "Hollywood RPG", where the
damage
> a weapon did was based entirely on its reputation: A Katana or
Shuriken
> would do lots and lots of damage, much like the weapons cited above...
Try HKAT. Bruce Lee punching does more damage than an Uzi. To a
certain extent D&D does this with its worship of swords (75% of all
magical weapons are some type of sword. Damage tables seem to be set up
so that people will pick swords more than any weapon). I'd wager any
game that uses hit points (ack! classes and levels are considered
archaic now, why can't we shake hit points?!).
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
wretc...@my-deja.com
> <7ih0g9$qke$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
> >
> >Unless those bullets happen to be Black Talon...
>
> If a cartridge or a weapon became more lethal by being vilified by
> the media and politicians, the Black Talon, the Uzi, and the AK-47
> would be the deadliest weapons on Earth.
>
> In the real world, Black Talon rounds are not magic, and aren't
> significantly more or less lethal than any other frangible or
> hollowpoint round.
Which is to say they do a nice job of doing tissue damage to most things
you'll be shooting at.
Håken Lid
>In article <7jaarg$faj$1...@birch.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> nos...@myplace.net wrote:
>> For years now we've made jokes about a "Hollywood RPG", where the
>damage
>> a weapon did was based entirely on its reputation: A Katana or
>Shuriken
>> would do lots and lots of damage, much like the weapons cited above...
>
>Try HKAT. Bruce Lee punching does more damage than an Uzi.
A very funny game. You don't run out of bullets unless you fumble. And
the first shot after you reload deals more damage than regular shots.
Haaken
Trent Redfield
The Ravenloft boxed set Masque of the Red Death is set in the 1890s.
It's set in Gothic Earth... the world of Dracula and Frankenstein. I
think it is one of the best things that TSR has done in the last few
years. I really enjoy playing and running Masque of the Red Death.
- Trent Redfield
Triad3204
> I'd wager any
>game that uses hit points (ack! classes and levels are considered
>archaic now, why can't we shake hit points?!).
Because no other damage system is a particularly marked improvement over hit
points -- except explicit hit location systems, and those generally suffer from
more complexity than most people are willing to put up with.
Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com
Trent Redfield
>wretc...@my-deja.com writes:
>> I'd wager any
>>game that uses hit points (ack! classes and levels are considered
>>archaic now, why can't we shake hit points?!).
>
>Because no other damage system is a particularly marked improvement >over hit points -- except explicit hit location systems, and those >generally suffer from more complexity than most people are willing to >put up with.
The Mutant Chronicles (MC) RPG (Target Games/Heartbreaker Hobbies)
uses a nice hit location system in combination with Body Points (BPs),
which are like hit points, but take into account the affect of being
hit in the head or the stomach. Many a MC character has died from one
bullet to the head. So far (luckily), none of mine have!
MC makes up for alot of the problems of hit points with a very simple
hit location chart. Check it out. I highly reccommend MC.
- Trent Redfield
Trent Redfield
Michael Dingler
> The Mutant Chronicles (MC) RPG (Target Games/Heartbreaker Hobbies)
> uses a nice hit location system in combination with Body Points (BPs),
> which are like hit points, but take into account the affect of being
> hit in the head or the stomach. Many a MC character has died from one
> bullet to the head. So far (luckily), none of mine have!
And I thought that a 'bullet to the brain' only makes you insane...
SCNR
...Michael...
Rick Cordes
Trent Redfield <pm3...@ssu.southwest.msus.edu> wrote:
>>>Triad3204 wrote: wretc...@my-deja.com writes:
>>>
>>> I'd wager any game that uses hit points (ack! classes and levels are
>>> considered archaic now, why can't we shake hit points?!).
>>
Hit locations should perhaps also join the dinosaurs. The purpose
of HLs, besides color, is to determine impairment. Impairments are then
expressed as penalties to one or more kinds of abilty. In all hit location
systems I've seen, there are effectively more hit locations than there are
kinds of impairment (I'm excluding systems with subsidary tables and
charts on the presumption these should are also be sleeping with the
fishes). The efficiency could be then, to generate the impairment directly,
rather than the hit location. When it is desired, the HL could be deduced
from the nature of the impairment and how it was inflicted. This is how
we do it, and it saves time, space, matter, and energy.
-Rick
Psychohist
Hit locations should perhaps also join the dinosaurs.
The purpose of HLs, besides color, is to determine
impairment.... The efficiency could be then, to generate
the impairment directly, rather than the hit location.
Of course, some of us like color in our dinosaurs ... er, RPGs.
Warren
Ed Chauvin IV
Cordes conspired to spread the following disinformation about Re: Hit
Points and Hit Locations [Mutant Chronicles] (Was Re: d&d campaign)
>In article <3760C1...@ssu.southwest.msus.edu>,
>Trent Redfield <pm3...@ssu.southwest.msus.edu> wrote:
>>>>Triad3204 wrote: wretc...@my-deja.com writes:
>>>>
>>>> I'd wager any game that uses hit points (ack! classes and levels are
>>>> considered archaic now, why can't we shake hit points?!).
>>>
>>...MC makes up for alot of the problems of hit points with a very simple
>>hit location chart. Check it out. I highly reccommend MC.
>
> Hit locations should perhaps also join the dinosaurs. The purpose
>of HLs, besides color, is to determine impairment. Impairments are then
>expressed as penalties to one or more kinds of abilty. In all hit location
>systems I've seen, there are effectively more hit locations than there are
>kinds of impairment (I'm excluding systems with subsidary tables and
>charts on the presumption these should are also be sleeping with the
>fishes). The efficiency could be then, to generate the impairment directly,
>rather than the hit location. When it is desired, the HL could be deduced
>from the nature of the impairment and how it was inflicted. This is how
>we do it, and it saves time, space, matter, and energy.
Have you taken a look at WFRP? There's 6 basic locations[1], with the
option of rolling on a critical hit table for a more specific[2]
result. The location is derived by reversing the to-hit roll (a d100
roll) and looking at a table that is repeated on the character sheets.
There was also a simpler table which only had death/no death results.
When we were playing regularly, everyone had the locations basically
memorized and we only used the specific tables at my (GM) discretion
(ie: only during the important battles). After using systems like
Aftermath this was much more enjoyable.
[1]: Head, Arm (L/R), Leg (L/R) and Body. What else do you need?
[2]: Actually more of a combined specific location and effect, such
as "The blow severs the target's head clean from the body, causing the
head to fly off and land 2d6 + 3' in a random direction."
Ed Chauvin IV
--
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the Beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
wretc...@my-deja.com
tria...@aol.com (Triad3204) wrote:
> Because no other damage system is a particularly marked improvement
> over hit
> points -- except explicit hit location systems, and those generally
> suffer from
> more complexity than most people are willing to put up with.
Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
death by paper cuts.
Determining the impairment of a non-lethal blow wouldn't take too much
effort by players and GM, even without a detailed location chart. Of
course that would be the kind of thing I'd run using logic rather than
charts anyway.
Supermouse
>Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
>the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
>necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
>death by paper cuts.
That's one of the things that the Storyteller system (though my use of
it is limited to Vampire) seems to me to do, though I hasten to add this
is purely IMHRO. A palpable hit can leave an opponent on their knees, or
out for the count, so between tougher fighters a lot of the action in
the games I've seen is trying to strike the telling blow. Those fights
tend to be tense, with lots of preamble, a few rounds of feinting and
blocks, and then a short one- or two-blow resolution.
Less tough characters, especially inept ones, seem to keep chipping at
each other ineffectually leaving the winner to be the last one who
actually falls over. And a fight between an inept and a highly ept is
very short and very humiliating, and there's very little preamble in
general, IME.
Having the fight being between vampires draws things out a little, as
vampires heal between rounds, but the general scenarios seem to be
similar for that sort of fight, too.
It's also a combat system for which it is very easy to pare down to the
minimum. As a roleplayer who doesn't much enjoy playing or running
combat, this is a definite plus, but I would bet that to the dedicated
enthusiast, or just those that like a touch of realism in a fight, it
has them tearing their hair out. Still, it works for me.
Cordially,
--
Supermouse
My name is Supermouse, Rodent of Rodents.
Look upon my cheese, ye mighty, and despair!
Psychohist
That's one of the things that the Storyteller system (though my use of
it is limited to Vampire) seems to me to do, though I hasten to add this
is purely IMHRO. A palpable hit can leave an opponent on their knees, or
out for the count, so between tougher fighters a lot of the action in
the games I've seen is trying to strike the telling blow.
My impression is a bit different. While the final blow is as you describe, the
key is to be the first to damage your opponent to the point where he has a
significant penalty. In a fight with a well matched opponent, this amount of
damage is an almost insurmountable handicap.
It's still a hit point system, though - just one in which everyone has the same
number of hit points.
Warren
Alain Lapalme
> In article <19990611061120...@ngol05.aol.com>,
> tria...@aol.com (Triad3204) wrote:
>
> > Because no other damage system is a particularly marked improvement
> > over hit
> > points -- except explicit hit location systems, and those generally
> > suffer from
> > more complexity than most people are willing to put up with.
>
> Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
> the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
> necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
> death by paper cuts.
I agree. However, I really haven't been able to find something which:1)
can provide suspense
2) is not too complex in terms of implementation
3) is fast
4) provides variety in terms of outcome
5) does not require the GM to be a combat expert
I've tried hit points (a la D&D), critical systems (Rolemaster), hit
locations, descriptive combat and many other approaches and they have
all failed in meeting even 4 out of 5 of the criteria I list above.
>
>
> Determining the impairment of a non-lethal blow wouldn't take too much
>
> effort by players and GM, even without a detailed location chart. Of
> course that would be the kind of thing I'd run using logic rather than
>
> charts anyway.
>
That's the easy part!
Alain
Rick Cordes
Ed Chauvin IV <edc...@newsguy.com> wrote:
>
>Along with other members of the ill reputed University of Hawaii, Rick
"Above all nations, humanity."
>>...In all hit location
>>systems I've seen, there are effectively more hit locations than there are
>>kinds of impairment (I'm excluding systems with subsidary tables and
>>charts on the presumption these should also be sleeping with the
>>fishes). The efficiency could be then, to generate the impairment directly,
>>rather than the hit location...
>
>Have you taken a look at WFRP? There's 6 basic locations[1], with the
>option of rolling on a critical hit table for a more specific[2]
>result. The location is derived by reversing the to-hit roll (a d100
>roll) and looking at a table that is repeated on the character sheets.
Warhammer? Not lately but what you describe sounds like what I
was eschewing. Six is more or less a typical minimum for HLs but without
recourse to tables, charts or further die rolls, by just reference
to the HLs, are six or more different kinds of impairment generated? If
not, then perhaps it's more reasonable to generate the impairments
directly.
>[1]: Head, Arm (L/R), Leg (L/R) and Body. What else do you need?
The point is, you may use these to generate impairment
indirectly but you need not. Rather than "I sprain my left little
toe, therefore, my movement is slowed my one hex per round," you
do it directly, "I incur a wound slowing my movement one hex per
round." Whatever die roll you use to generate the hit location,
instead, you use it to generate the impairment.
>[2]: Actually more of a combined specific location and effect, such
>as "The blow severs the target's head clean from the body, causing the
>head to fly off and land 2d6 + 3' in a random direction."
Color like this is sometimes of interest but usually of little
import tactically. (10' seems to be too far for an average unless you
are counting for roll, and even then best this eqation would only be
good for level ground.)
-Rick
Frank T. Sronce
>
> > Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
> > the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
> > necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
> > death by paper cuts.
>
> I agree. However, I really haven't been able to find something which:1)
> can provide suspense
> 2) is not too complex in terms of implementation
> 3) is fast
> 4) provides variety in terms of outcome
> 5) does not require the GM to be a combat expert
>
> I've tried hit points (a la D&D), critical systems (Rolemaster), hit
> locations, descriptive combat and many other approaches and they have
> all failed in meeting even 4 out of 5 of the criteria I list above.
>
Perhaps you should try Amber? Going diceless tends to meet all of the
above qualifications except the last one... :-)
Kiz
-but it should meet 4 out of _those_ 5.
>
> Alain
Neel Krishnaswami
Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
>'Supermouse' posts, in part:
>
> That's one of the things that the Storyteller system (though my use of
> it is limited to Vampire) seems to me to do, though I hasten to add this
> is purely IMHRO. A palpable hit can leave an opponent on their knees, or
> out for the count, so between tougher fighters a lot of the action in
> the games I've seen is trying to strike the telling blow.
>My impression is a bit different. While the final blow is as you
>describe, the key is to be the first to damage your opponent to the
>point where he has a significant penalty. In a fight with a well
>matched opponent, this amount of damage is an almost insurmountable
>handicap.
This 'death spiral' effect is something that I've decided doesn't
belong in games with larger-than-life characters. I've come to believe
that the death spiral in _End of the Line_ is a design mistake;
unfortunately it's too late to change it. It's not a critical flaw,
though, because there's a fortune point mechanic to let PCs blunt its
impact.
Neel
Alain Lapalme
> Alain Lapalme wrote:
> >
>
> >
> > I agree. However, I really haven't been able to find something
> which:1)
> > can provide suspense
> > 2) is not too complex in terms of implementation
> > 3) is fast
> > 4) provides variety in terms of outcome
> > 5) does not require the GM to be a combat expert
> >
> > I've tried hit points (a la D&D), critical systems (Rolemaster), hit
>
> > locations, descriptive combat and many other approaches and they
> have
> > all failed in meeting even 4 out of 5 of the criteria I list above.
> >
>
> Perhaps you should try Amber? Going diceless tends to meet
> all of the
> above qualifications except the last one... :-)
>
I haven't used Amber but have have been running diceless games for close
to 5 years. Diceless gaming does meet requirements 1, 2, 3. I've been
able to handle 5. However, the problem has been that 4) has become
repetitive which has had a negative impact on 1). What hasn't helped
either is that combat is now so rare that I've probably lost the knack
of running a good physical combat scene (somehow a magical/spiritual
combat scene has been much easier - not sure why yet).
Alain
Mary K. Kuhner
>This 'death spiral' effect is something that I've decided doesn't
>belong in games with larger-than-life characters. I've come to believe
>that the death spiral in _End of the Line_ is a design mistake;
>unfortunately it's too late to change it. It's not a critical flaw,
>though, because there's a fortune point mechanic to let PCs blunt its
>impact.
For larger-thn-life games, my experience is that the Death Spiral is good
for a game where the several PCs are often facing off against one
more powerful villain (say, a superhero team versus a supervillain).
It gives a sense of progress, something to accomplish. But it's not
good for a game where the PCs are facing off against hordes of weaker
opponents, because it means that one or two early bad rolls condemn
the PCs either to die, or to become miserably ineffectual and unheroic
due to their wounds.
I think three of the four "oops, let's start over" party-death
debacles in our long Shadowrun game were due to a key PC getting
onto the death spiral too early. We had fortune points, but the
Shadowrun spiral is very steep: unless you realize at the start
that you must immediately spend karma on that trivial-sounding
light wound, you will run out trying to cover all the rolls you
need to cover. I recall one battle where it was discovered that
the PC pack-rat had 17 points squirrelled away. He spent them all,
and managed to stagger away with a Serious wound, rather than
dead: any other PC would of course have died.
I am amused to realize tht I don't know whether _Radiant_ has a
death spiral or not, because no one has ever tried to fight
while injured, not in the whole five year lifespan of the
campaign. Both of its parent systems do, though.
Feng Shui has a mild death spiral which we tended to ignore, though
it is nice when the PCs are up against one too-powerful opponent.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Neel Krishnaswami
Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>Neel Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>>This 'death spiral' effect is something that I've decided doesn't
>>belong in games with larger-than-life characters. I've come to believe
>>that the death spiral in _End of the Line_ is a design mistake;
>>unfortunately it's too late to change it. It's not a critical flaw,
>>though, because there's a fortune point mechanic to let PCs blunt its
>>impact.
>
>For larger-thn-life games, my experience is that the Death Spiral is good
>for a game where the several PCs are often facing off against one
>more powerful villain (say, a superhero team versus a supervillain).
>It gives a sense of progress, something to accomplish. But it's not
>good for a game where the PCs are facing off against hordes of weaker
>opponents, because it means that one or two early bad rolls condemn
>the PCs either to die, or to become miserably ineffectual and unheroic
>due to their wounds.
This last is the problem for me. The PCs and the major NPCs are of
roughly equivalent strength, and a combat-focused main character can
take down another with 2 or 3 blows barring fortune expenditures. So I
don't need to worry too much about grindingly slow combats.
But I don't like that a gang of mooks can grind a PC to ineffectuality,
especially since fighting hordes of inferior foes can effectively
challenge to the characters without challenging the players' character
conceptions.
If the master swordsman is ambushed by a horde of lesser opponents,
and is finally overwhelmed after dispatching dozens of them, he is
still (in everyone's minds) a master swordsman. If a single villain
who isn't supposed to be another ultimate warrior fights him to a
standstill and then beats him, the mental picture of the PC as a
master is weakened -- even though he has been beaten in both cases.
Since I *want* to support the characterization of the PCs as hyper-
competent, poor mook-handling is not a good thing.
In EotL, the mook-handling is not very good, because both PCs and
NPCs can kill each other too quickly. A PC who goes first can often
take out a dozen or more enemies with a single action, but if many
survive that first strike, they can chip him down to human-scale.
If I were starting over, I would make it both harder for a PC to
take out lots of mooks in a single action, and I would make it
harder for mooks to grind away a PC.
>We had fortune points, but the Shadowrun spiral is very steep:
>unless you realize at the start that you must immediately spend
>karma on that trivial-sounding light wound, you will run out trying
>to cover all the rolls you need to cover. I recall one battle where
>it was discovered that the PC pack-rat had 17 points squirrelled
>away. He spent them all, and managed to stagger away with a Serious
>wound, rather than dead: any other PC would of course have died.
I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
rolls. A single bad experience like this can be enough put me off a
system -- my visceral dislike of Deadlands stems precisely from an
experience like you describe.
I think it's because the two are on such different time scales -- if
my PC contracted a disease that damaged learning (-1 xp per session,
say), then after a half-dozen sessions I would be just as much in the
hole as if I managed to spend 6 xp as fate points 6 sessions into the
campaign. But I would resent it a lot less, because the effects of the
drug are on the same (player-level) time scale as the regular gain of
experience.
>Feng Shui has a mild death spiral which we tended to ignore, though
>it is nice when the PCs are up against one too-powerful opponent.
The death checks don't bother; the impairment effects of injuries do.
This is because losing AV weakens both the offense and the defense,
and it's IME important to keep a comeback a real possibility.
Neel
Ed Chauvin IV
Points and Hit Locations [Mutant Chronicles] (Was Re: d&d campaign)
>In article <3761b4c1...@enews.newsguy.com>,
I was all set to defend the WFRP system (which I like particularly) by
saying that a similar efficiency is garnered by combining the to-hit
roll and the location roll. But then it occurred to me, why couldn't
all three of these be combined into a single roll?
I thought about it. I mulled it over. I considered it. I think I
like it. Then it occurs to me that combining the to-hit roll with the
location/effect roll eliminates some potential effects. Almost no
character would ever hit on a 99, and this is not a desirable
situation (not for me anyway, what's the point of working out neat
tables that are utterly useless?). So, I decided it would be best to
scrap the original WFRP to-hit roll/location combination in favor of a
separate to-hit roll and a combined location/effect roll.
As the location table stands for WFRP these are the number of
potential results by location:
Head: 15
Body: 25
L arm: 20
R arm: 20
L leg: 10
R leg: 10
Personally, I think this spread feels right. I can't explain why, but
I don't see any reason mucking with it. Only thing I've got to do now
is convert the existing effect tables (which have 16 results per
table) and maybe add an effect or three where I've got room. I'll
probably also get 'round to working up plausible effects for weapons
other than swords/axes.
Thanks for the inspiration.
>>[2]: Actually more of a combined specific location and effect, such
>>as "The blow severs the target's head clean from the body, causing the
>>head to fly off and land 2d6 + 3' in a random direction."
>
> Color like this is sometimes of interest but usually of little
>import tactically.
Which is why the "Sudden Death" critical hit tables are provided, and
intended for use during most battles.
Just as an aside, WFRP has a definite dramatist feel to it, in more
respects than just this one.
>(10' seems to be too far for an average unless you
>are counting for roll, and even then best this eqation would only be
>good for level ground.)
Well, yes. I didn't mean to suggest that the provided tables were
ideal. In fact, a common complaint of WFRP players is the fact that
it's quite possible to cut your opponent in half with a staff.
Albeit, highly improbable.
Unfortunately, the obvious solution to this problem is to make more
tables.
Mary K. Kuhner
>I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
>pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
>accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
>rolls.
I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
for advancement, and that it was essentially a no-advancement
campaign. This helped--though I still had a terrible time using
Karma at appropriate points, since you really have to use it
early in the death spiral or it's ineffectual. (This is a
bad trait for fortune points, in my opinion; I am not interested
in making their use a tactical challenge.)
The problem then was that the two PCs who were not generally in
lethal danger (being neither mages, front-line fighters, nor
deckers) accumulated huge, frightening Karma pools. If they had
spent it on advancement they would have become unreasonably more
advanced than the other PCs, but it felt wrong that they had
17 points just sitting around. (It was unwholesomely tempting to
spend it on, say, 8 autosuccesses on some strategically important
roll.)
You can get highly unnatural (to my mind) results by conflating
fortune points and experience points. Two bad things can happen:
(1) PCs who do not need to spend karma to survive end up
with too many EXP relative to the others; and (2) if a PC is
a front-line combat type, but a little weak, he will have to
spend more karma to survive and will shortly be even weaker
relative to the others. In other words, it can amplify small
starting differences, rather like the AD&D EXP bonus for
high stats. If you plan a long campaign, this is a bad idea.
_Radiant_ does not have fortune points or EXP, but if it did I
would separate the two strictly. We've discussed fortune points
on several occasions, but the game has too few rolls; many
key episodes have just one roll. Any reasonable number of
fortune points feels, to me as the player, like it gives too much
player control. I don't mind having one fortune point for a
twenty-roll combat, but having one for a one-roll psychic struggle
(Radiant's main form of direct conflict) doesn't work for me.
Also, we have found that the big campaign-threatening disasters
for this particular game aren't bad rolls, but bad consequences
of player or GM decisions, and those are hard to fix with fortune
points.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Martin Mertens
>I think three of the four "oops, let's start over" party-death
>debacles in our long Shadowrun game were due to a key PC getting
>onto the death spiral too early. We had fortune points, but the
>Shadowrun spiral is very steep: unless you realize at the start
>that you must immediately spend karma on that trivial-sounding
>light wound, you will run out trying to cover all the rolls you
>need to cover.
A spiral as steep as SR's may also force the characters to attack with
maximum force from the start, even in a situation that is likely
harmless:
We recently had a SR brawl where the PCs would have liked to keep
things non-lethal and not-too-threatening from their end, i.e. attack
unarmed. However, they could not afford to EVEN TRY this as they did
not know exactly how good their opponents were, and losing just one
round of hand-to-hand combat (because your enemy is better than you
thought and is using a melee weapon and you are not) may easily finish
you in SR by starting said spiral.
In a system without a spiral, a PC may be able to afford getting hit a
few times (while trying to get the hang of the opponent) and then
still decide to bring out the big guns (or spells, melee weapons etc.)
himself - and still stand a chance.
Greetings, Martin
--
Martin....@post.rwth-aachen.de
Heaven wouldn't be heaven if you
remembered your friends in hell.
Ero...@aol.com
>
> >I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
> >pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
> >accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
> >rolls.
>
> I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
> by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
> for advancement, and that it was essentially a no-advancement
> campaign. This helped--though I still had a terrible time using
> Karma at appropriate points, since you really have to use it
> early in the death spiral or it's ineffectual. (This is a
> bad trait for fortune points, in my opinion; I am not interested
> in making their use a tactical challenge.)
I'm not that familiar with Shadowrun, having only played it a few times,
but could this be an "assumption clash" between you and the game
designers/playtesters? Maybe they were thinking in terms of "Of course
you use Karma to keep from getting injured for as long as possible. Why
would anyone suck up an injury when they still have the Karma to prevent
it? It's a no-brainer; no tactical decision-making necessary."
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@aol.com (mail drop)
Er...@ix.netcom.com (surfboard)
Frank T. Sronce
>
> Neel Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> >I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
> >pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
> >accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
> >rolls.
>
> I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
> by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
> for advancement, and that it was essentially a no-advancement
> campaign. This helped--though I still had a terrible time using
> Karma at appropriate points, since you really have to use it
> early in the death spiral or it's ineffectual. (This is a
> bad trait for fortune points, in my opinion; I am not interested
> in making their use a tactical challenge.)
>
Is this an old edition of Shadowrun, perhaps? My understanding under
the current rules is that you have two separate XP and Karma pools.
Whenever you receive an XP award of 10 points or more, 10% of it goes to
the Karma pool instead. And Karma isn't spent permanently (except in
special situations), but can be reused.
Of course, with a long-term campaign, you still have problems- most of
our characters now have 10 Karma, and I'd almost rather it _were_ used
up permanently, because 10 points gives you a lot of rerolls... I find
it amusing that last session other PCs used up their Karma pools
entirely whereas my character never had to use a single point. :-)
The Shadowrun death-spiral is still there, though- even a light wound
can halve the number of successes you get on a roll. There is an Adept
power that lets you ignore some of those penalties, but only adepts can
get it- there isn't even a cyberware equivalent. Personally, I'd like
to see 'em add some rules allowing "tough" characters to get that
benefit through some stat or skill, perhaps.
I'll have to think about some possible rule modifications for that- the
"death-spiral" may be realistic, but sometimes you don't want it in your
game.
Kiz
Frank T. Sronce
> > Neel Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > >I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
> > >pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
> > >accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
> > >rolls.
> >
> > I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
> > by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
> > for advancement, and that it was essentially a no-advancement
> > campaign. This helped--though I still had a terrible time using
> > Karma at appropriate points, since you really have to use it
> > early in the death spiral or it's ineffectual. (This is a
> > bad trait for fortune points, in my opinion; I am not interested
> > in making their use a tactical challenge.)
>
> but could this be an "assumption clash" between you and the game
> designers/playtesters? Maybe they were thinking in terms of "Of course
> you use Karma to keep from getting injured for as long as possible. Why
> would anyone suck up an injury when they still have the Karma to prevent
> it? It's a no-brainer; no tactical decision-making necessary."
>
> Erol K. Bayburt
> Ero...@aol.com (mail drop)
> Er...@ix.netcom.com (surfboard)
The problem lies with the "light wound". This, clearly, won't kill
you. In fact, you could take a dozen or so of 'em before you'd be in
trouble. And they only impose a 1 point penalty to your rolls. So they
_look_ ignorable- save your Karma for preventing the Moderate, Serious,
and Deadly wounds. But doing so would be a mistake- a 1 point penalty
is a big deal in Shadowrun- it can easily halve the number of successes
you get on all of your rolls, so a lightly wounded person has little
chance of defeating an uninjured person, all else being equal.
Kiz
-oh, and there's a cute one in the rules we found last weekend. Stock
up on survival knives. They cost 450 each and come with a bunch of
extras, including a trauma patch. Trauma patches cost 500 each, so sell
the patch and keep the profit. :-)
Sakura
Frank T. Sronce <fsr...@myriad.net> wrote:
>"Mary K. Kuhner" wrote:
>> I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
>> by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
>> for advancement
>the current rules is that you have two separate XP and Karma pools.
>Whenever you receive an XP award of 10 points or more, 10% of it goes to
>the Karma pool instead. And Karma isn't spent permanently (except in
>special situations), but can be reused.
That was my understanding as well. Maybe there's also rules that allow
you to spend Good Karma? I don't recall.
> Of course, with a long-term campaign, you still have problems- most of
>our characters now have 10 Karma, and I'd almost rather it _were_ used
>up permanently, because 10 points gives you a lot of rerolls...
...and it's very hard to get players to burn their Karma points
permanently. Maybe if the 'permanent loss' option also gave a significant
gain, they'd be more likely to use it, but as of now, it's a fool's
bargain.
> The Shadowrun death-spiral is still there, though- even a light wound
>can halve the number of successes you get on a roll. There is an Adept
>power that lets you ignore some of those penalties, but only adepts can
>get it- there isn't even a cyberware equivalent.
Are you sure? I'm almost certain I remember pain editors or trauma
dampers or some similar kind of cyberware, that basically removes wound
penalties up to a certain level.
J
--
Hostes aliengeni me abduxerent. Jeff Johnston - je...@io.com
Qui annus est? http://www.io.com/~jeffj
Mary K. Kuhner
>I'm not that familiar with Shadowrun, having only played it a few times,
>but could this be an "assumption clash" between you and the game
>designers/playtesters? Maybe they were thinking in terms of "Of course
>you use Karma to keep from getting injured for as long as possible. Why
>would anyone suck up an injury when they still have the Karma to prevent
>it? It's a no-brainer; no tactical decision-making necessary."
I should say, when I said "Shadowrun" I meant "Shadowrun first
edition". The death spiral doesn't change in the later editions, but
the handling of karma points does.
I suppose the game designers might have meant you to spend karma
every single time you took a light wound, but this produces (since
in 1st Ed karma==exp) a godawful exp edge for non-combatant or
non-karma-spending PCs, which will eventually sink the game in my
experience. It also doesn't feel good to me: fortune points are
not hit points, and having to spend them every time you're hit
really makes them into hit points.
Furthermore, if you spend karma on light wounds in little fights
you'll run out (at least at the rate my GM gave it out) and die
in the big fights; but if you don't spend it, and the little fight
turns into a big fight, it's too late. Once you have a light wound,
you are on the spiral and almost no amount of karma will save
you. The GM could give so much karma that no one ever allowed a
light wound to stand, but this would really, to my tastes, suck
the juice out of combat.
Later editions of SR handled this better, I'm told. We had so many
house rules by the time 2nd Ed came out that we never contemplated
switching over.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Frank T. Sronce
>
> In article <3767AAD3...@myriad.net>,
> Frank T. Sronce <fsr...@myriad.net> wrote:
> >"Mary K. Kuhner" wrote:
> >> I don't like it either. I dealt with it in the Shadowrun campaign
> >> by telling myself firmly that Karma was for saving one's ass, not
> >> for advancement
> > Is this an old edition of Shadowrun, perhaps? My understanding under
> >the current rules is that you have two separate XP and Karma pools.
> >Whenever you receive an XP award of 10 points or more, 10% of it goes to
> >the Karma pool instead. And Karma isn't spent permanently (except in
> >special situations), but can be reused.
>
> That was my understanding as well. Maybe there's also rules that allow
> you to spend Good Karma? I don't recall.
>
> > Of course, with a long-term campaign, you still have problems- most of
> >our characters now have 10 Karma, and I'd almost rather it _were_ used
> >up permanently, because 10 points gives you a lot of rerolls...
>
> ...and it's very hard to get players to burn their Karma points
> permanently. Maybe if the 'permanent loss' option also gave a significant
> gain, they'd be more likely to use it, but as of now, it's a fool's
> bargain.
>
Yeah, as I recall, burning points permanently lets you lower the
difficulty instead of just getting rerolls- but it specifically forbids
you from lowering it to the point where it would be _better_ than a
reroll, so it's just dumb.
> > The Shadowrun death-spiral is still there, though- even a light wound
> >can halve the number of successes you get on a roll. There is an Adept
> >power that lets you ignore some of those penalties, but only adepts can
> >get it- there isn't even a cyberware equivalent.
>
> Are you sure? I'm almost certain I remember pain editors or trauma
> dampers or some similar kind of cyberware, that basically removes wound
> penalties up to a certain level.
>
There may well be some in an expansion somewhere, but not in the basic
rulebook (unless it's well hidden, I suppose). Cyberpunk had some pain
editors, you might be thinking of that.
I _like_ Shadowrun's wound system in many ways- it's nifty that you can
stage a "light" wound up to a "deadly" wound by getting enough
successes, and you can do the reverse by soaking it well enough.
Unfortunately, it takes at least 6 dice for it to be possible to stage a
light up to a deadly, and an 'ordinary' person generally won't have that
many dice. So an ordinary person with a small handgun (6L damage) isn't
ever going to kill a burglar with a small handgun unless he has a skill
of at least 3 in pistols and allocates some combat pool to it...
Kiz
Psychohist
wounds, Neelakanton Krishnaswami comments that "This 'death spiral' effect is
something that I've decided doesn't belong in games with larger-than-life
characters."
I agree that it's bad for heroic flavor - if it happens to the player
characters, they have to either finish a long battle in which they know they
are doomed, or retreat unheroically; if it happens to the bad guys, they have
plenty of time to retreat or escape, denying the player characters a heroic
victory.
On the other hand, from a gamist perspective, it has its attractions: it can
be quite challenging having to constantly update one's estimates of how
dangerous each opponent currently is, and the resulting tactical decisions can
be quite interesting.
Warren
red
> light wound to stand, but this would really, to my tastes, suck
> the juice out of combat.
<Homer> Mmmm, combat juice... </Homer>
red
> I _like_ Shadowrun's wound system in many ways- it's nifty that you can
> stage a "light" wound up to a "deadly" wound by getting enough
> successes, and you can do the reverse by soaking it well enough.
Conspiracy X uses a similar staging mechanic, although to my mind more
elegant than Shadowruns.
red
> The point is, you may use these to generate impairment
> indirectly but you need not. Rather than "I sprain my left little
> toe, therefore, my movement is slowed my one hex per round," you
> do it directly, "I incur a wound slowing my movement one hex per
> round." Whatever die roll you use to generate the hit location,
> instead, you use it to generate the impairment.
>
From my perspective, I'd rather know that it was the left little toe
that was sprained, and figure out the penalty by thumbsuck. The major
virtue in hitloc sytems is that they provide narrative detail about the
attack, IMO.
red
> Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
> the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
> necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
> death by paper cuts.
>
As I believe someone else pointed out, hit points do not imply lots of
hit points. There are lots of ways of using a basic hit poitn mechanic.
wretc...@my-deja.com
Call them hit points, health points, body levels or whetever you like
and the effect is still that characters have an ablative rating that
defines how much injury they can take. This is what I find to be a
problem, not merely the inflation of hit point totals to ludicrous
levels.
Bryant Berggren (Vox Ludator)
<fsr...@myriad.net> wrote:
>Sakura wrote:
>> Are you sure? I'm almost certain I remember pain editors or trauma
>> dampers or some similar kind of cyberware, that basically removes wound
>> penalties up to a certain level.
>
> There may well be some in an expansion somewhere, but not in the basic
> rulebook (unless it's well hidden, I suppose). Cyberpunk had some pain
> editors, you might be thinking of that.
Yes, it's an expansion, but an old one (SHADOWTECH, 1992).
Technically, though, these things were bioware (bioengineered tailored
organs), not cyberware.
Damage Compensators: "Pain sinks", essentially, rated from 1-10 -- as
long as the number of filled boxes on a damage track is less than your
rating, you ignore all penalties from that track.
Pain Editor: A flat super-compensator. Ignore all penalties until it's
switched off. It also adds 1 to Willpower and subtracts 1 from
Intelligence, and only the GM knows how much damage you've really
taken.
Trauma Damper: Any physical hit shifts 1 box of damge to the mental
track; any mental damage subtracts 1 box.
None of these really get you out of the Death Spiral, they just give
you a chance to ignore you're *in* the Death Spiral if you can end the
fight quick enough.
--
Frank T. Sronce
Got any good alternatives? I haven't really seen any yet.
Kiz
Rick Cordes
red <r...@spamblok.redflag.force9.net> wrote:
>
>From my perspective, I'd rather know that it was the left little toe
>that was sprained, and figure out the penalty by thumbsuck. The major
>virtue in hitloc sytems is that they provide narrative detail about the
>attack, IMO.
The way we play, a single die roll (for missiles) or comparison
of two die rolls (for melee) determines the success of the attack or
the exchange, as well as, the degree and nature of the incurred impairment
(if armour is worn, this is mitigated by an armour roll). By virtue
how the wound was inflicted and the impairment it incurred, we may imagine
what the wound is, either then, afterwards or never.
In this approach, narrative detail is sacrificed to the extent
it is optional, though, by the same token, narrative flow is not stymied
by being made dependent on narrative detail. You seem to advocate:
[Generate Hit Location] ---> [Thumbsuck] ---> [Generate Impairment],
as opposed to:
[Generate Impairment] ---> [Optional Thumbsuck ---> Generate HL].
I'm of course prejudiced but here are my objections. As a part of
roleplay, narrative detail is essential but having a forensic pathologist's
commentary running every melee seems dramatically like losing track of the
forrest for the trees. In terms of pace, the mandated thumbsucking will
be taxing and impede both game and drama. In terms of fairness, it seems
to me, impairment should be randomly and objectively tactically generated,
and not left to arbitrary judgement. Leaving it to arbitrary judgement
unnecessarillly risks being unfair, the appearance of being unfair and
the anxiety of being unfair.
Finally, you always need to generate the impairment or damage;
hit location you need not, except when it is of interest as it is for
the sake of roleplay and would not in general work to encourage roleplay.
-Rick
red
>
> Finally, you always need to generate the impairment or damage;
> hit location you need not, except when it is of interest as it is for
> the sake of roleplay and would not in general work to encourage roleplay.
This describes the differences in our approaches. From my perspective,
the penalty need not be determined, because I can always impose a
situational penalty, and in fact I often feel it is more appropriate to
apply situational penalties for wounds than a fixed penalty. But I also
find that the exact nature of the wound is of much greater importance to
my play/GM style than the rating of that wound, and I am never happy
walking around with a "non-specific injury rating X". To me, the
mechanical penalties are of much less significance than knowing whether
the character is using their left or right hand to open a door, so the
location of the injury is directly pertinent. To me, a wound result of
"stabbed in the left shoulder" is much more useful than "a Serious
wound", even though the former does not include a mechanical measure of
severity. I also find my players react much better to an injury they
can identify with as material, than with one that is purely notional and
mechanical. But then, you know, mileage varies - I do tend towards the
diceless/rules light side of things (as opposed to the Rules Dark Side,
muahahahaha.....). Ultimately, I'd prefer a completely different
mechanic that produced realistic wounds rather than one that produced
mechanically consistent wounds.
lam...@my-deja.com
> >
> > In article <3768BFC2...@spamblok.redflag.force9.net>,
> > r...@spamblok.redflag.force9.net wrote:
> > > As I believe someone else pointed out, hit points do not imply
lots of
> > > hit points. There are lots of ways of using a basic hit poitn
> > mechanic.
> > Call them hit points, health points, body levels or whetever you
like
> > and the effect is still that characters have an ablative rating that
> > defines how much injury they can take. This is what I find to be a
> > problem, not merely the inflation of hit point totals to ludicrous
> > levels.
> Got any good alternatives? I haven't really seen any yet.
I tried a system where each wound generated an imparement, imparements
were cumulative, but your 'wound level' (used to calculate time to
heal and chance of death) was not cumulative.
First aid, medicine, some magical healing and recovery rolls were all
at a character's total penalty, with effects and difficulty determined
by wound level.
Slightly oversimplified (on an open ended d10 system):
light wound -1 (normally heals in a week or two)
medium wound -3 (normally reduced to light in a month or so)
heavy wound -5
incapacitating wound -7 (will/personality roll required to
remain active, may have permanent
effects)
mortal wound -9 (will die in hours if not treated)
leathal wound -10 (will die in one round barring magic)
KIA N/A (nothing helps)
At total penalty of -10 or more a will roll or personality trait roll
was required to remain active, the alternative being that your character
was more or less incapacitated by pain.
Most PCs never took anything worse than a heavy wound (even when
wounded already), so the death spiral was not too bad. (I think
a monster scored a KIA on a reckless new character once. And one
character took a mortal or incapacitating wound on a cattle raid,
he lived.)
The problems were in that multiple wounds made an expert medic a
neccessity for after heavy combat. And that PCs tended to keep
fighting even when wounded, NPCs would do the sane thing and
surrender or retreat when at -5 or so in cumulative penalties.
Then the PC would became ineffective in combat (too many penalties) and
die of his wounds when the superhumanly competent medic could not
overcome the penalties in place.
Only game I ever ran where most PC fatalities were after the fight
from wound effects rather than during the fight. (I still wonder
why with a price list that included healing magic no one bought any.)
A diferent flavor from HPs, but not much better really.
DougL
John Kim
hit points and hit locations recently. First of all, regarding hit
location systems. Mechanically, the main effect of hit locations
is generally linking impairment (i.e. action penalty due to wounds)
to a specific body part. i.e. Someone gets shot in the leg. By
most hit location systems, they have reduced movement but can
still, say, shoot or swing a sword with no penalty. By most wound
track systems, they would have a penalty to all actions.
Personally, I find the all-action penalty more believable
than the body-part penalty. Of course, it is technically possible
to mix these (i.e. a wound gives a -3 penalty to right leg use,
and a -1 penalty overall). However, that gets far too complicated
for my tastes.
As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering and
jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit to the
opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get used to
rolling the dice and resolving such things before describing the
attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted attack and then
rolling dice and describing the result.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Kiz aka Frank T. Sronce <fsr...@myriad.net> wrote:
>wretc...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Call them hit points, health points, body levels or whetever you like
>> and the effect is still that characters have an ablative rating that
>> defines how much injury they can take. This is what I find to be a
>> problem, not merely the inflation of hit point totals to ludicrous
>> levels.
>
>Got any good alternatives? I haven't really seen any yet.
Well, there are alternatives -- but I'd agree that most that
I have seen are not a significant improvement on wound tracks.
Actually, I have not seen this in a published system, but I think
a compromise system is quite possible. You have a wound track
similar to those in _Ars Magica_, _Shadowrun_, or Storyteller.
However, there are different numbers of boxes at different
levels. i.e.
1. Hurt O O O O
2. Wounded O O O
3. Serious O O
4. Grievous O O
5. Crippled O
Find the amount of damage you do (the number on the left)
and mark the leftmost box on that track, staging down only if all
those are filled. Thus, it takes four 1-point wounds to scale up
to a 2-point wound. Thus, after taking a 3-point wound, you
could take up to 3 2-point wounds before being any worse off.
This prevents small wounds from quickly accumulating into
lethal effects, but allows them to accumulate without much
bookkeeping.
-*-*-*-
As some other alternatives:
In a homebrew I played (called _Spellcrafter_), you had
a damage resistance (DR) rating, where wounds (and the impairment
they cause) are recorded independently of DR. However, most wounds
will lower DR. i.e. So let's say you start at 5 DR. An opponent
rolls a 6 damage total against you. Comparing 6 damage to 5 DR
results in a light wound, and your DR is reduced by 1. Later,
the opponent again rolls a 6 damage total: but now that is a
medium wound.
Having a low DR doesn't do anything bad to you in itself,
it just makes you more vulnerable to later wounds. However, in
practice this wasn't very different from a hit point system where
the damage done had a very high variance.
-*-*-*-
Another option (used by CORPS) is to track wound
impairments and lethality separately. For example, in CORPS,
each wound causes impairment to its hit location, and also have
a chance of being "eventually fatal" or "instantly fatal".
Personally, I think that CORPS damage has a lot of complication
for fairly small gain in realism over simpler systems.
(I like other features of CORPS, but the damage isn't one of
them.)
John R. Snead
: Frank T. Sronce wrote:
Very true. Also their whole hit point mechanic is one of the most
elegant and easy to use that I've seen.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
John R. Snead
: Rick Cordes wrote:
: > The point is, you may use these to generate impairment
: > indirectly but you need not. Rather than "I sprain my left little
: > toe, therefore, my movement is slowed my one hex per round," you
: > do it directly, "I incur a wound slowing my movement one hex per
: > round." Whatever die roll you use to generate the hit location,
: > instead, you use it to generate the impairment.
: >
: From my perspective, I'd rather know that it was the left little toe
: that was sprained, and figure out the penalty by thumbsuck. The major
: virtue in hitloc sytems is that they provide narrative detail about the
: attack, IMO.
Hit location systems also have (to me) one additional benefit. They are
the single best way I've found to resolve attacks from cover. If your PC is
shooting from behind a wall with only head and one arm exposed, then
unless the attacker takes some sort of aimed shot (at penalty) any attack
which rolls a location other than head or the appropriate arm hits the
wall instead. You get a simple mechanic and nice narrative combat.
For an easy hit location chart, I pulled the following off a gaming
mailing list several years ago. Hit locations don't get much easier than
this.
--------------------------------------------
Amused to Death <ma...@hotstar.net> said,
>According to my research, the following are accurate (within 5% each area).
>These are based on wounds from WWI to present
>
>Ranged
>1 Head
>2 Arms, 1-3 left/4-6 right
>3 Chest
>4 Abdomen
>5 Left Leg
>6 Right Leg
>Melee
>1 Head
>2 Left Arm
>3 Right Arm
>4 Chest
>5 Abdomen
>6 Legs, 1-3 left/4-6 right
------------------------------
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
John R. Snead
: -*-*-*-
: Another option (used by CORPS) is to track wound
: impairments and lethality separately. For example, in CORPS,
: each wound causes impairment to its hit location, and also have
: a chance of being "eventually fatal" or "instantly fatal".
: Personally, I think that CORPS damage has a lot of complication
: for fairly small gain in realism over simpler systems.
: (I like other features of CORPS, but the damage isn't one of
: them.)
The CORPS damage system, like the whole rest of CORPS does a reasonable
job of simulating realism, but at the cost of a truly mind-numbing level
of complexity. If find the basic resolution mechanic good (though it was
improved on by the similar mechanic in Conspiracy X), but everything else
is nightmarishly (to me) complex. That's generally the primary problem
with high-detail systems, especially ones which have a high level of
combat detail.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
Frank T. Sronce
What IS the Conspiracy X hit point mechanic? I've heard people gripe
about their mechanics before, but not many who praised them. Alas, I'm
completely unfamiliar with the game myself.
Kiz
Frank T. Sronce
That does look kind of interesting. So if you had 2 boxes checked off
in "Hurt" and took a level 2 wound (moderate, perhaps), you'd have 3
boxes checked off in "Hurt" and one in "Wounded", and would take the
action penalties for being wounded, right? Nifty.
Shadowrun just used a non-linear way of increasing the damage done.
Every two successes moved the damage up one class from 1 point to 3
points to 6 to 12. 12+ would take someone out instantly. My real
problem with it was that even 1 point of damage screwed your skills up
so much that you were in big trouble after that. :-)
Kiz
Travis S. Casey
> This is a general reply concerning the recent discussion of
>hit points and hit locations recently. First of all, regarding hit
>location systems. Mechanically, the main effect of hit locations
>is generally linking impairment (i.e. action penalty due to wounds)
>to a specific body part. i.e. Someone gets shot in the leg. By
>most hit location systems, they have reduced movement but can
>still, say, shoot or swing a sword with no penalty. By most wound
>track systems, they would have a penalty to all actions.
>
> Personally, I find the all-action penalty more believable
>than the body-part penalty. Of course, it is technically possible
>to mix these (i.e. a wound gives a -3 penalty to right leg use,
>and a -1 penalty overall). However, that gets far too complicated
>for my tastes.
Another solution would be to simply give a specific impairment as the
result of a hit, without specifying how it's caused -- i.e., leaving the
exact hit up to the GM. Thus, a hit might cause "-2 to movement", and the
details of whether a leg, foot, or the abdomen was hit would be left up to
the GM.
> As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
>tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
>I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering and
>jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit to the
>opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get used to
>rolling the dice and resolving such things before describing the
>attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted attack and then
>rolling dice and describing the result.
I have that problem as well, but not because I narrate the blow before
rolling... rather because hit location systems often produce locations
that are too random. If a halfling attacks a troll with his dagger, a
head strike is unlikely. On a more extreme note, if a warrior armed with a
sword is at the front end of a 90-foot long dragon and attacks, a hit to
the dragon's left rear leg is laughable.
Hit location systems seem to do best when all the combatants are humanoid
and about the same size; in more varied environments, the mechanics needed
to automatically generate "good" hit locations can get painful.
> Well, there are alternatives -- but I'd agree that most that
>I have seen are not a significant improvement on wound tracks.
>Actually, I have not seen this in a published system, but I think
>a compromise system is quite possible. You have a wound track
>similar to those in _Ars Magica_, _Shadowrun_, or Storyteller.
>However, there are different numbers of boxes at different
>levels. i.e.
>
> 1. Hurt O O O O
> 2. Wounded O O O
> 3. Serious O O
> 4. Grievous O O
> 5. Crippled O
>
> Find the amount of damage you do (the number on the left)
>and mark the leftmost box on that track, staging down only if all
>those are filled. Thus, it takes four 1-point wounds to scale up
>to a 2-point wound. Thus, after taking a 3-point wound, you
>could take up to 3 2-point wounds before being any worse off.
>This prevents small wounds from quickly accumulating into
>lethal effects, but allows them to accumulate without much
>bookkeeping.
This is a lot like what Pacesetter did in their games. Their system,
IIRC, used the same number of boxes on each level, but new wounds that
were less serious than one you already had inflicted no further penalty,
and didn't add in unless you managed to get enough of them to "push up"
high enough.
On a mud mailing list, someone was once looking for a non-hit-point-based
system where the first blow could never kill, but later blows could, with
an increasing chance of a kill as more wounds were accumulated. Here's
what I came up with for that:
Each strike does a number of damage points. After a strike that causes
damage, the character struck has to make a Health check against the
total amount of damage he/she had taken *prior* to the current strike.
Thus, for the first hit, the check is always against difficulty 0, but
after that, it becomes more and more difficult.
A failed check is indexed on a table to indicate what the exact effect
is, with results varying from slight impairments up to death.
Since this would have been for a mud, the internal workings would have
been hidden from players, and the computer would do the table lookup. For
a paper RPG, you'd want to modify it a bit, but something similar could
still be used.
--
|\ _,,,---,,_ Travis S. Casey <efi...@io.com>
ZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ No one agrees with me. Not even me.
|,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-'
'---''(_/--' `-'\_)
Patrick O'Duffy
> I dislike systems where experience and fortune come out of the same
> pool, mostly because as a player I really hate watching a slow
> accumulation of experience be blown away by a fast run of poor die
> rolls. A single bad experience like this can be enough put me off a
> system -- my visceral dislike of Deadlands stems precisely from an
> experience like you describe.
My current campaign (using FUDGE) pretty much revolves around using FUDGE
points in the way you describe. Players use them for a) improving dice rolls,
b) reducing damage, c) activating their wacky abilities for a scene (they're
all modern avatars of Norse gods), and d) experience.
I'm finding it's working okay. But I think there are some major reasons
why I'm (hopefully) avoiding the problems you and Mary have mentioned.
First off, it's a limited duration game, not an ongoing campaign. The
problems of long-term experience isn't an issue (whole campaign's only about 2
weeks game time). For this reason, the players really aren't bothering using
the points for experience.
Second (and this part surprised me), the players rarely use them for dice
bonuses. They seem content to accept failures, even in 'critical'
situations. Of course, it helps that most of them have fairly good skill
levels in one or two important skills, so they rarely need to fudge the rolls.
So the players nurse the FP for negating wounds and power-ups. It _seems_
to be working fairly well - however, the situations of the game (and the
capacities of the PCs) change every few sessions, so I'm still keeping a
careful eye on it.
The death spiral thing does worry me, though. Currently, all the PCs are
wandering around various states of damage (2 Hurt, 2 Very Hurt), and they're
suffering modifiers as a result. So far, they seem to have enough Fudge
Points to stay ahead of the curve (gain 1 per session, combat only every
second session on average), but next session could be pretty tricky.
I'd hazard a guess that mixing experience/fortune (etc) works a lot better
ina dramatic context (such as my compaign) than in a more realistic campaign.
Dramatically, they're kind of the same thing - bonuses to spotlight time. If
a character gets better at something, survives a bullet, or does something
spectacular, they're all similar - a chance to grab the attention of the
audience (rest of group) and take temporary control of the game environment.
In a realistic game, experience is exactly that - a 'simulation' of the
character's learning curve.
Well, that's my take on it.
--
Patrick O'Duffy, Brisbane, Australia
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all
for fuckoffs & misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a
filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector,
but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and
masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"
John Kim
John R. Snead <jsn...@netcom.com> wrote:
>Hit location systems also have (to me) one additional benefit. They
>are the single best way I've found to resolve attacks from cover. If
>your PC is shooting from behind a wall with only head and one arm
>exposed, then unless the attacker takes some sort of aimed shot
>(at penalty) any attack which rolls a location other than head or
>the appropriate arm hits the wall instead. You get a simple
>mechanic and nice narrative combat.
Hmm. I find this one of the annoyingly dumb things about
simple hit location systems, actually... namely, the binary choice
of going for a called shot or not. If it isn't a called shot,
then no matter how skilled you are or how lucky your shot was, you
always have an even spread over the target. If it is a called shot,
you have 0% chance of hitting anything other than your specified
location.
In particular, this is noticable in systems where the player
must choose (1) a "normal" shot, or (2) a "called shot" to the
center of the target -- like the chest or vitals. To me, this is
a nonsensical question: of course you're trying to shoot for the
center of the target! However, most hit-location systems insist
that these two cases are significantly different.
This is resolved by systems like _Millenium's End_
transparent overlays, or _The Babylon Project_'s hex-grid,
but those are more complexity than I am willing to deal with
(although I think a parallel to ME overlays could work for a
simpler system).
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
In a non-hit-location system, cover is represented by a
simple to-hit penalty. This better represents the basic reality
that *all* basic shots are "called shots" to the rough center
of the target. i.e. The more skilled you are or the luckier
your shot, the closer to the center of the target you get and
(in general) the more damage you do. If you miss because of
the cover penalty, then you hit part of the cover.
This reality is easily represented as long as you first
determine the accuracy of the shot (i.e. by how much the hit roll was
made by) and the damage, and then interpret that into a description
which includes hit location. i.e. The player rolls and hits by 12
for a wad of damage, so the GM describes a fatal shot to the chest.
John R. Snead
: What IS the Conspiracy X hit point mechanic? I've heard people gripe
: about their mechanics before, but not many who praised them. Alas, I'm
: completely unfamiliar with the game myself.
It's been my fave for several years now. The basics: Stats and Skills
go 1-5, and so do tasks (impossibly difficult tasks can be level 6, but
they're *really* rare). If the level of a task is less than the level of
the associated skill (or stat if the task is lifting a heavy object or
something similar) then the character automatically succeeds. If task
level = skill level then a roll of 7+ on 2D6 succeeds (with a few simple
modifiers raising or lowering this chance by a point or two). If the task
level is 1 higher than the skill level then a 10+ roll on 2D6 succeeds.
Taking extra time and care lowers a task difficulty by one, rushing it
raises it by 1... If a tasks is 2 or more levels above the character's
skill then w/o special assistance the character cannot succeed.
Combat is handled the same way. Damage is divided into lethal and
non-lethal. Both have 3 levels (effectively light medium & serious), and
6 points within each level. Weapons have both a level rating and a point
rating. (so a moderate-sized pistol like a 9mm does a Medium-3 wound (3
points at medium level). If you take more than six points in a wound
level the wound goes up to the next category. Also, when a character is
hit they roll their Size (a stat which also includes Stamina) vs the
points the weapon does to stage damage down a level, and the attacker
rolls the weapon's points vs the target's Size to stage the wound up a
level. There are also fairly sensible wound penalties, stun and knock out
rolls if a character is wounded. It's all quite quick, especially since
modern combat is damned lethal & debilitating. After at most 3 hits
almost any character will be dead or knocked out.
The whole system is quite granular, but that's the way I like it, and
it's clean and fast and doesn't get in the way.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
John Kim
John R. Snead <jsn...@netcom.com> wrote:
>John Kim (jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu) wrote:
>: Another option (used by CORPS) is to track wound impairments and
>: lethality separately. For example, in CORPS, each wound causes
>: impairment to its hit location, and also have a chance of being
>: "eventually fatal" or "instantly fatal". Personally, I think
>: that CORPS damage has a lot of complication for fairly small
>: gain in realism over simpler systems.
>:
>: (I like other features of CORPS, but the damage isn't one of
>: them.)
>
>The CORPS damage system, like the whole rest of CORPS does a
>reasonable job of simulating realism, but at the cost of a truly
>mind-numbing level of complexity. I find the basic resolution
>mechanic good (though it was improved on by the similar mechanic in
>Conspiracy X), but everything else is nightmarishly (to me) complex.
Agreed in general. The basic resolution mechanic is the
main feature I was thinking of. Between the mind-numbing complexity
and the lethality, the CORPS combat system seems designed to
encourage players not to fight :-). I don't have Conspiracy X,
but I will definitely check it out now.
Other CORPS features of note: The skill mechanic (i.e.
Primary+Secondary+Tertiary) is interesting and not particularly
complex, but after some use I find I don't prefer it over
other skill lists. The grouping it forces leads to more problems
than it solves, and the cost structure emphasizes break points
(i.e. 4+2+1) far too much, IMO.
Revenant
> Why hit points though? The idea of whittling down the opponent lacks
> the flair of back and forth looking for the vital opening that I deem
> necessary in my games. I want heroes striking triumphant blows, not
> death by paper cuts.
A major advantage to hit points that your suggested approach lacks is
that it prevents one or two lucky rolls deciding the combat.
This is something that would need to be watched out for in an
alternate approach...
-------------- Revenant [reve...@interact.net.au] -------------------
"The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live
on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
- author Robert A. Heinlein on censorship.
Martin Mertens
>A major advantage to hit points [...] is
>that it prevents one or two lucky rolls deciding the combat.
For some types of games, some people actually LIKE to have the
possibility of a lucky roll deciding the combat...
BTW, this can easily be done with hit points as well, e.g. via
open-ended rolls (cf. Warhammer, Feng Shui).
Greetings, Martin
--
Martin....@post.rwth-aachen.de
Heaven wouldn't be heaven if you
remembered your friends in hell.
Lee Short
> [snip] ... By
> most hit location systems, they have reduced movement but can
> still, say, shoot or swing a sword with no penalty. By most wound
> track systems, they would have a penalty to all actions.
>
> Personally, I find the all-action penalty more believable
> than the body-part penalty. Of course, it is technically possible
> to mix these (i.e. a wound gives a -3 penalty to right leg use,
> and a -1 penalty overall). However, that gets far too complicated
> for my tastes.
I agree with you here -- both in finding the all-action penalty more
believable,and in finding differential penalty levels too complicated.
I use a hit location system that gives an all-action penalty. The reason
for
the hit location system is for differential armor coverings.
> As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
> tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
> I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering and
> jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit to the
> opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get used to
> rolling the dice and resolving such things before describing the
> attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted attack and then
> rolling dice and describing the result.
As a fencer, I find the idea expressed above totally foreign. By thisI mean
the idea that you go into an attack knowing just what the
form and timing of it will be. Usually I go into an attack just
probing for openings, and the real attack comes when I think I've
found one. Sometimes I have a fixed plan of attack, but this is
not the general case.
I suppose you could break the action up into sub-actions -- ie,
the attacker describes his probe, the defender describes his
response, the GM/dice are consulted to determine the apparent
opening (and, secretly, if the opening is real or just bait), and
then the attacker describes his real attack and the defender
describes his real defense. But this is way more spotlight time
than I want to spend on combat.
Folks whose experience is with heavier weapons might have
a different take on this, but that's mine.
That's why I REALLY dislike the combat system in Amber.
Reading through the combat examples, all the reasons given
for GM decisions seem to penalize what I would consider as
very realistic tactics.
I don't mean to pick on Amber -- I know there are other
games with this kind of a system. It's just the one I'm most
familiar with.
Lee
--
Lee Short
Software Commissar
Blackcat Solutions, Inc
blac...@pro-ns.net
wretc...@my-deja.com
efi...@fnord.io.com (Travis S. Casey) wrote:
> > As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
> >tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
> >I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering and
> >jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit to the
> >opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get used to
> >rolling the dice and resolving such things before describing the
> >attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted attack and then
> >rolling dice and describing the result.
>
> rolling... rather because hit location systems often produce locations
> that are too random. If a halfling attacks a troll with his dagger, a
> head strike is unlikely. On a more extreme note, if a warrior armed
with a
> sword is at the front end of a 90-foot long dragon and attacks, a hit
to
> the dragon's left rear leg is laughable.
Indeed.
> Hit location systems seem to do best when all the combatants are
humanoid
> and about the same size; in more varied environments, the mechanics
needed
> to automatically generate "good" hit locations can get painful.
Which is precisely why I don't use hit locations systems.
> On a mud mailing list, someone was once looking for a
non-hit-point-based
> system where the first blow could never kill, but later blows could,
with
> an increasing chance of a kill as more wounds were accumulated.
Here's
> what I came up with for that:
>
> Each strike does a number of damage points. After a strike that
causes
> damage, the character struck has to make a Health check against the
> total amount of damage he/she had taken *prior* to the current
strike.
> Thus, for the first hit, the check is always against difficulty 0,
but
> after that, it becomes more and more difficult.
>
> A failed check is indexed on a table to indicate what the exact
effect
> is, with results varying from slight impairments up to death.
>
> Since this would have been for a mud, the internal workings would have
> been hidden from players, and the computer would do the table lookup.
For
> a paper RPG, you'd want to modify it a bit, but something similar
could
> still be used.
I prefer to use a sliding scale which relects the turning tides of the
encounter rather than a specific impairment system. The overall effect
is that unless there is a huge discrepency in skill first round rolls
won't mean the end. Actually first round rolls are usually "feeling out"
your opponents style for weak points and not actually full on combat.
This avoids the death spiral and allows for a cinemetic feel in that
when one party has been brought to the edge of defeat they can try
something new and have a dramatic comeback. Since this comeback is
reflected by the tides of combat turning and the former victim gaining
the upper hand, you don't have the problem that the prior blows make
your hero as vulnerable as before during the comeba comeback. This
allows for cinematic effects without the bizzare healing rules in HKAT.
Psychohist
As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering
and jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit
to the opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get
used to rolling the dice and resolving such things before
describing the attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted
attack and then rolling dice and describing the result.
The trick is to break off the description at the appropriate point.
The backhand swing could still hit a limb on either side - one side may be more
forward than the other (in medieval combat as opposed to modern fencing) - but
you may be in trouble if you've also described the target's body position.
I find that a hit location system that doesn't need to be consulted except in
unusual circumstances to be ideal. I don't need the extra color on every blow,
and don't want the delay - but if there's the potential for a 'limb off'
result, it's pretty important to know which limb, for future reference if
nothing else.
Warren
lam...@my-deja.com
Lee Short <blac...@pro-ns.net> wrote:
[SNIP]
> That's why I REALLY dislike the combat system in Amber.
> Reading through the combat examples, all the reasons given
> for GM decisions seem to penalize what I would consider as
> very realistic tactics.
> I don't mean to pick on Amber -- I know there are other
> games with this kind of a system. It's just the one I'm most
> familiar with.
My reaction to Amber combat has always been: 'My character is
superhumanly competent. He is actually there. And you want me
to give a description of what he is doing?!? Fine! He attacks
the enemy by whatever method seems best to him. Since he knows
orders of magnitude more about the details of the situation and
combat in general then every player and gamemater in this room he
automatically makes a better decision than any of us could come
up with. Since my opponent is doing what someone who is by
comparison a complete incompetent working with insuficient data
says, I win easily.'
Detailed tactical options often leave me with this reaction, but
Amber by the nature of the characters and the fact that their
variation in combat ALL comes from the description strikes me as
unusually bad this way.
DougL
Mike Harvey
> Kiz aka Frank T. Sronce <fsr...@myriad.net> wrote:
> >Got any good alternatives? I haven't really seen any yet.
>
> I have seen are not a significant improvement on wound tracks.
> Actually, I have not seen this in a published system, but I think
> a compromise system is quite possible. You have a wound track
> similar to those in _Ars Magica_, _Shadowrun_, or Storyteller.
> However, there are different numbers of boxes at different
> levels. i.e.
>
> 1. Hurt O O O O
> 2. Wounded O O O
> 3. Serious O O
> 4. Grievous O O
> 5. Crippled O
You just described FUDGE. It's default wound system looks like this:
1-2 Just a scratch 0 0 0 no game effect
3-4 Light Wound 0 0 -1 to all actions
5-6 Serious Wound 0 -2 to all actions
7-8 Incapacitated 0 out of the fight
9+ Near Death 0
Instant Death
The number of "boxes" for each wound category are determined by the GM,
allowing her to control the "cinematic-ness" of the game. As an option,
they can also be determined by toughness. Another option is to change
the damage numbers in the left column, or to change (or ignore) the
penalties for different wound levels.
Incapacitated means the character is either unconscious or otherwise
unable to undertake any strenuous action like fighting; some GMs (like
me) will allow an incapacitated character to attempt an action for a -3
or -4 penalty. Near Death means the character will be dead soon without
immediate medical attention. Instant Death has no official "damage
number" associated with it, and is considered GM discretion. I usually
fix it around 11+. The wound effects in the column on the right are not
cumulative. If an uninjured character takes a serious wound, he is
immediately at -2 to all actions. If he then takes a light wound in the
next round, he marks off a light wound box, but takes no further
penalties for it, since he is already suffering for the serious wound.
> Find the amount of damage you do (the number on the left)
> and mark the leftmost box on that track, staging down only if all
> those are filled. Thus, it takes four 1-point wounds to scale up
> to a 2-point wound. Thus, after taking a 3-point wound, you
> could take up to 3 2-point wounds before being any worse off.
> This prevents small wounds from quickly accumulating into
> lethal effects, but allows them to accumulate without much
> bookkeeping.
That is exactly how Fudge works. Minor detail: if you take a light
wound, and all your light wound boxes are filled, you mark off a serious
wound, but make a note that it is actually a light wound for purposes of
healing.
BTW, members of the Fudge community have also adapted this wound
tracking system to keep track of fatigue and insanity as well.
Mike
Timothy Dedeaux
(snip)
>That's why I REALLY dislike the combat system in Amber.
>Reading through the combat examples, all the reasons given
>for GM decisions seem to penalize what I would consider as
>very realistic tactics.
>
>I don't mean to pick on Amber -- I know there are other
>games with this kind of a system. It's just the one I'm most
>familiar with.
>
>Lee
Could you elaborate on this, please? I've used Amber as a resource for
description based roleplaying, and I was wondering what your specific
complaints were. I'm always interested in gaming issues such as this, and I
really respect your opinion.
- Tim Dedeaux
Avi Sinister
>John Kim wrote:
snip
>> As far as flavor goes, the problem I have with hit location
>> tables is that they will often fail to match the narrative detail
>> I already have. i.e. I describe the enemy warrior recovering and
>> jumping up with a backhand swing, and the result says a hit to the
>> opposite side. I suppose those who like them simply get used to
>> rolling the dice and resolving such things before describing the
>> attack -- but I prefer to describe the attempted attack and then
>> rolling dice and describing the result.
>
mean
>the idea that you go into an attack knowing just what the
>form and timing of it will be. Usually I go into an attack just
>probing for openings, and the real attack comes when I think I've
>found one. Sometimes I have a fixed plan of attack, but this is
>not the general case.
Sorry to butt in here, but I just had to express my agreement with this
opinion and dismay at what so many gamers take as a given--that an attacker
decides on a specific target area before the combatants engage. As a former
fencer (its been a few years) I found my best attacks occurred when even *I*
wasn't aware I was about to attack. If I saw a potential opening, but
hesitated to think about it, I generally held off. I found if I *thought*
about an attack, I telegraphed my intentions to my opponent and--more often
than not--found myself parried or worse.
--
ARG:The Adventure Roleplay Gaming System
http://members.tripod.com/argrpg
---{ remove nospam to reply }---
Lee Short
> >That's why I REALLY dislike the combat system in Amber.
> >Reading through the combat examples, all the reasons given
> >for GM decisions seem to penalize what I would consider as
> >very realistic tactics.
> >
> Could you elaborate on this, please? I've used Amber as a resource for
> description based roleplaying, and I was wondering what your specific
> complaints were. I'm always interested in gaming issues such as this, and I
> really respect your opinion.
I've got a few issues with it. Some of them are Amber-specific;
most would apply to any description-based combat system.
I'll take the quickest one first:
(1) If the GM has no knowledge of fencing (or other combat form
as appropriate) -- and one of the players does know fencing, then the
GM judgements will seem totally out to lunch. Fortunately, most
GMs should realize this. Unfortunately, the rulebook tries to give
advice to just such GMs on how to do adjudication. IME, this
only gives the GM false confidence in her ability. OTOH, this
might work very well in a gaming group with no fencers.
Doug Lampert's criticism is very similar.
(2) there are some just plain goofy statements -- such as, "if
both parties have roughly equal strength, then a Beat won't do
much of anything other than waste a valuable opportunity"
(AMBER, p.91).
(3) Footwork is not given nearly enough consideration. In
the game, only major movements are even considered (ie,
ducking or dodging to the left is important -- but a simple
advance is irrelevant). In real life, small movements are
often very important.
(4) The example duel (Shadow Knight, p.216) has the
following explanation for why the combat was lost by the
PC: "...From the very description of the foe, the player was
hesitant. The resolution is undecided up to this point. After
all, the Game Master took great effort to explain the player
character's disadvantages, and the opponent's strengths. In
his caution, Jayson just hasn't probed enough to figure out
any openings."
I would simply point out that caution is usually the best
way to figure out any openings. The statement from the
book simply does not compute.
The player's very first action in the duel was "I'll circle to
keep my distance from his arms. Just keep the distance."
In any real duel, circling to keep the distance will be
accompanied by feints and other measures designed to
gauge your opponent's skill (such feints can even be done
purely by footwork). If I had been the PC above, and the
GM told me my character had simply not probed the enemy
and that I lost because of that, I'd be very upset.
This is related to my last point.
(5) A real fencing bout is composed of very many very small
actions -- and Amber tries to focus on only the big ones. This
means that the decision points are not at the right place, and the
time scale is wrong.
For an example, one of my favorite attacks is as follows:
Extending my arm as I advance into range, I beat the underside
of my opponent's blade and do a quick, tight circle with my
epee to the outside of their guard. At this point, I'm not close
enough to touch yet, but I'm attacking their forearm. I continue
to press my attack, but I am careful to watch for the expected
parry. When the parry comes, I circle my blade down under
the parry for a touch on the thigh (or so I hope). If the parry
never comes, or comes too late -- I follow through with the
original attack for a high-line touch on the forearm.
This attack is hard to describe in the Amber system. Either the
GM must break the action several times during the course of this
single attack (to give me the option of my disengage to low-line).
I could just give him the whole description of the complex attack.
This would work fairly well except for one thing. Sometimes the
opponent will duck my blade-beat at the beginning of the attack.
Then I will stop my attack in its tracks and retreat and defend.
But, per Amber, the GM will hold me to my attack.
But suppose the GM is sensible and stops the action and allows me
to react (ie, the GM adjusts the decision points to something
reasonable). Then there will be hundreds of these decision points
in a single combat, and you could spend your entire 6-hour gaming
session adjudicating a single one-on-one combat.
Consider:
GM: "Ready?? Fence!!"
Player: I come off the line slowly, epee in 6, to double-advance-lunge
distance.
GM: Your opponent advances slowly too, his epee in 6 as well. He's
righty and you're lefty, so your blades are fairly close.
Player: I'll advance in, moving my blade just a hair farther out than
usual. What's his reaction?
GM: He retreats a step.
Player: I'll take a two-inch step and try to make it seem normal, while
I circle my blade down into low-line.
GM: Your opponent holds his ground, and extends his arm into an
attack on your forearm.
Player: What's my distance judgement? Do I think he can reach me?
GM: Probably not, but you're not sure of it.
Player: OK, I'll drop my hand low and parry my blade back across
my body from inside to outside, in high-line.
GM: You parry his blade, and he retreats and recovers.
Player: OK, I recover.
This is the level of detail I would find necessary to do the job
right.
Nightshade
This is one reason I've never found random hit location ludicrous. I
may start out intending one thing, but the attack that actually lands
(and few games assume that a single attack roll is only a single
attack) may end up far and away from it, depending on actions on the
part of the defender that are well below the threshold of description
detail.
Frank T. Sronce
>
> That is exactly how Fudge works. Minor detail: if you take a light
> wound, and all your light wound boxes are filled, you mark off a serious
> wound, but make a note that it is actually a light wound for purposes of
> healing.
>
> BTW, members of the Fudge community have also adapted this wound
> tracking system to keep track of fatigue and insanity as well.
>
> Mike
Personally, I'd have a Serious wound put a mark under Light, Medium,
AND Serious, but that would probably make things less cinematic. Does
this system work well in practice? Would you say it ends up being
realistic or cinematic?
Kiz
lam...@my-deja.com
Lee Short <blac...@pro-ns.net> wrote:
[SNIP]
> I've got a few issues with it. Some of them are Amber-specific;
> most would apply to any description-based combat system.
>
> I'll take the quickest one first:
>
> (1) If the GM has no knowledge of fencing (or other combat form
> as appropriate) -- and one of the players does know fencing, then the
> GM judgements will seem totally out to lunch. Fortunately, most
> GMs should realize this. Unfortunately, the rulebook tries to give
> advice to just such GMs on how to do adjudication. IME, this
> only gives the GM false confidence in her ability. OTOH, this
> might work very well in a gaming group with no fencers.
>
> Doug Lampert's criticism is very similar.
Not quite (almost everyone I have played with as a GM in the last decade
has fenced).
My objection is that the characters know more than the player OR the GM
(they do this for a living, and learned from others who did it for real,
and in Amber are superhumanly competent to start with).
Further the bandwidth limits of description apply to me but not to my
character. Thus the character has a higher skill AND better
information, his default decision should be better than any verbal
description I can give. Thus details of combat should be abstracted
in the same way details of starship repair tend to be.
The only options I should have to deal with in combat are the sorts
of consious intelectual decisions that have to do with goals, not
means. If my character is so incompetent that my decisions based on
verbal description are comperable to his based on being there then
he is probably out of luck anyway.
[SNIP some good points]
> (5) A real fencing bout is composed of very many very small
> actions -- and Amber tries to focus on only the big ones. This
> means that the decision points are not at the right place, and the
> time scale is wrong.
And misses the fact that the small actions drive the large ones.
[SNIP long example description of a beat, double disengage attack,
something that takes all of one second or less in real life, and
includes two or three decision points (each of which is actually
decided by reflex).]
> This is the level of detail I would find necessary to do the job
> right.
Which unless the game is to spend all night on a single small combat
is (IMHO) too fine a scale to be usable.
This sort of thing can all be abstracted, but in doing so you lose the
ability to have meaningful 'narative' resolution, since you have lost
exactly the details that determine the course of a real fight. Just
use dice, or let the overall story decide. (Except that neither works
in Amber.)
Epidiah
Frank T. Sronce wrote in message +ADw-3770D399.A3BD3533+AEA-myriad.net+AD4-...
+AD4-Mike Harvey wrote:
+AD4APg-
+AD4APg- That is exactly how Fudge works. Minor detail: if you take a light
+AD4APg- wound, and all your light wound boxes are filled, you mark off a serious
+AD4APg- wound, but make a note that it is actually a light wound for purposes of
+AD4APg- healing.
+AD4APg-
+AD4APg- BTW, members of the Fudge community have also adapted this wound
+AD4APg- tracking system to keep track of fatigue and insanity as well.
+AD4APg-
+AD4APg- Mike
+AD4-
+AD4-
+AD4- Personally, I'd have a Serious wound put a mark under Light, Medium,
+AD4-AND Serious, but that would probably make things less cinematic. Does
+AD4-this system work well in practice? Would you say it ends up being
+AD4-realistic or cinematic?
+AD4-
+AD4-Kiz
Actually, due to other factors in the system (namely the penalty to all
actions a serious wound causes) it would be unnecessarily harsh to mark off
any other wounds. Once a character takes a serious wound, the odds the next
swing at the character will hit and the damage done will both increase. This
makes the basic wound track realistic enough for my tastes and generally
realistic compared to other games. It's important to note that, like much in
Fudge, the realism of the wound system depends on what other options you
choose to use in your game.
On the other hand, all it takes is a few tweaks suggested in the Fudge rules
to make it as cinematic as you want.
-Eppy
Alain Lapalme
> Mike Harvey wrote:
> >
> > That is exactly how Fudge works. Minor detail: if you take a light
> > wound, and all your light wound boxes are filled, you mark off a
> serious
> > wound, but make a note that it is actually a light wound for
> purposes of
> > healing.
> >
> > BTW, members of the Fudge community have also adapted this wound
> > tracking system to keep track of fatigue and insanity as well.
> >
> > Mike
>
> Personally, I'd have a Serious wound put a mark under Light,
> Medium,
> AND Serious, but that would probably make things less cinematic. Does
>
> this system work well in practice? Would you say it ends up being
> realistic or cinematic?
>
> Kiz
I've tried both realistic and cinematic and Fudge works pretty well
under both approaches. Mind you, I don't use the damage system outlined
in a previous post. I just describe which gives me enough leeway to
adjust the wound level and its impact depending on the type of game I'm
running.
Alain
Psychohist
resolution of combat:
GM: "Ready?? Fence!!"
Player: I come off the line slowly, epee in 6, to
double-advance-lunge distance.
GM: Your opponent advances slowly too, his epee in 6 as well. He's
righty and you're lefty, so your blades are fairly close.
Player: I'll advance in, moving my blade just a hair farther out than
usual. What's his reaction?
GM: He retreats a step.
Player: I'll take a two-inch step and try to make it seem normal, while
I circle my blade down into low-line.
GM: Your opponent holds his ground, and extends his arm into an
attack on your forearm.
Player: What's my distance judgement? Do I think he can reach me?
GM: Probably not, but you're not sure of it.
Player: OK, I'll drop my hand low and parry my blade back across
my body from inside to outside, in high-line.
GM: You parry his blade, and he retreats and recovers.
Player: OK, I recover.
This is the level of detail I would find necessary to do the job
right.
Doug Lampert agrees:
Which unless the game is to spend all night on a single small combat
is (IMHO) too fine a scale to be usable.
This sort of thing can all be abstracted, but in doing so you lose the
ability to have meaningful 'narative' resolution, since you have lost
exactly the details that determine the course of a real fight. Just
use dice, or let the overall story decide. (Except that neither works
in Amber.)
Since you guys have actual fencing experience, I have a related question: If
you are _not_ using the narrative to resolve the action, what levels of
abstraction are okay?
For example, is the following a reasonable summary of the above (ignoring the
method of resolution for the moment):
Player: I probe for a bit, waiting to see if he does anything.
GM: He attacks.
Player: I parry.
Also, what levels of decision making is it reasonable for the player to do
above the level of the original detailed description? Presumably it's okay to
have the player decide whether to get into the fight in the first place. How
much information does he need to make the decision to parry meaningful? Does
he have to know the attack is in response to a two inche step (not three, not
one), or is it enough to know that the opponent isn't clearly out of range?
Warren Dew
lam...@my-deja.com
In my case you are probably asking the wrong person. I am not at
the RPG to play 'En Guarde', I really do not care that much about
combat resolution methods, I just want the results to match the
Genre.
I normally play Pendragon, Runequest, or Ars Magica variants.
These strike me as providing a fine level of detail (hardly any
at all...).
The details I want are what are the character is trying to do,
I want the 'default' combat option in the game to represent
someone who has a given skill level doing his best to stay alive
and kill the enemy. Combat options and choices are for when this
is not what you are up to IMO.
Much beyond this and you are substituting player skill for
character skill in an area where doing so makes no real sence.
(Unlike, say, social interaction where to some extent it is
inevitable.)
> For example, is the following a reasonable summary of the above
(ignoring the
> method of resolution for the moment):
>
> Player: I probe for a bit, waiting to see if he does anything.
> GM: He attacks.
> Player: I parry.
Not unless the probe has a meaningful chance of leading to an attack.
Probing is not a wait action, it is the opening to an attack option
in which you reserve the ability to call off the attack.
Most 'detailed' RPG combat systems either give too little reason for
probing and waiting, or they hedge it with wierd tactical options.
Both of which tend to throw the time scale off.
I would resolve the whole passage above either as two attack vs deffence
rolls (one for each character) or as a single contest of skill. Just
abstract it as a combat round.
> Also, what levels of decision making is it reasonable for the player
to do
> above the level of the original detailed description? Presumably it's
okay to
> have the player decide whether to get into the fight in the first
place. How
> much information does he need to make the decision to parry
meaningful? Does
> he have to know the attack is in response to a two inche step (not
three, not
> one), or is it enough to know that the opponent isn't clearly out of
range?
Eh? When to dodge, retreat, parry, some combination, or simply
ignore an attack because it is off line is NOT likely to be a consious
decision. It is reflex, so why should the player get the ability to
make the decision consiously when it the character is not doing so?
Stuart Barrow
On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, Lee Short wrote:
> I've got a few issues with it. Some of them are Amber-specific;
> most would apply to any description-based combat system.
>
> I'll take the quickest one first:
>
Your points (to my mind) are more a criticism of the examples given in the
Amber rulebook than of the system. Now, as you say, a good GM will bow to
the judgement of the person with the more experience. Also, a good player
will know that the GMs decision is final.
I'll accept that Amber's system has some holes. However, the only time
where the situation you describe below would have any bearing on the game
is if a) both characters are exactly equally matched, unlikely but not
impossible and b) neither has the opportunity to do anything but fence.
No taunting, no rigging the court, no shouting "look out behind you", no
arranging for an ally to sneak up behind your opponent so as to provide
that cute bit of irony when he doesn't look behind him, nothing - a duel
in a vacuum. (Or, in a gym. :))
> (5) A real fencing bout is composed of very many very small
> actions -- and Amber tries to focus on only the big ones. This
> means that the decision points are not at the right place, and the
> time scale is wrong.
Well... Ok. I'd argue that, to pick something from my field of expertise,
analysing a chemical compound involves a number of very small actions.
However, whatever resolution system I'm using, I don't want the following
scenario:
GM: OK, you go into the NMR room. The machine is in use.
PC: I'll sign the booking sheet for the earliest slot.
GM: That's in fifteen minutes.
PC: Cool! I'll go back to my lab. I'll take out an NMR tube and put
20 mgs of sample and 1ml of dueteriochloroform in it.
GM: All your NMR tubes have samples in them.
PC: I'll rinse one out.
GM: Which one?
PC: Uh, well, the nitroalanine one was just analysing the starting
materials. I'll rinse it out with dichloromethane, then blow nitrogen
through it, using a pipette.
GM: The nitrogen line is connected to your other reaction.
PC: Crap. I'll connect up a balloon.
GM: Ok. Ten minutes later, the tube is dry.
PC: Ok. 20 mgs of the sample and 1 ml of chloroform.
GM: Sam walks in and asks if you're going to use your time.
PC: Run past him. Put the tube in the machine.
GM: It breaks.
PC: I was pressing the air button!
GM: Ok, it goes gently into the probe.
...
Yes, ok, it's not really the same, and it's unlikely to be as critical to
the game as a fencing bout. But just as I'd accept:
"I'll analyse the compound."
"It appears to be strychnine, or something similar."
I'm happy with
"I kick the bucket at him while leaping for the chandelier."
"He knocks the bucket away and grabs your feet."
or
"I parry."
"He gets through your guard and leaves a cut on your cheek."
> This is the level of detail I would find necessary to do the job
> right.
Well, if the narrative system is your only means of resolution, sure, I
guess. But at that stage, you're not roleplaying, you're just talking.
I don't see how it would be necessary in Amber.
Anyway,
Stu.
Frank T. Sronce
>
> For example, is the following a reasonable summary of the above (ignoring the
> method of resolution for the moment):
>
> Player: I probe for a bit, waiting to see if he does anything.
> GM: He attacks.
> Player: I parry.
>
> above the level of the original detailed description? Presumably it's okay to
> have the player decide whether to get into the fight in the first place. How
> much information does he need to make the decision to parry meaningful? Does
> he have to know the attack is in response to a two inche step (not three, not
> one), or is it enough to know that the opponent isn't clearly out of range?
>
Actually, in all of the Amber games I've been involved in, your Warfare
stat was far more meaningful to your chance of success than your
knowledge of fencing. YMMV, of course.
Kiz
Nightshade
>Well... Ok. I'd argue that, to pick something from my field of expertise,
>analysing a chemical compound involves a number of very small actions.
>However, whatever resolution system I'm using, I don't want the following
>scenario:
I'd say that's an arguement against narrative resolution in general,
personally. That fact that in Amber I routinely had to make decisions
involving fine details I know nothing about is one of the things that
put me off the game after exactly one attempt to use it as a GM.
Stuart Barrow
On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
> I'd say that's an arguement against narrative resolution in general,
> personally. That fact that in Amber I routinely had to make decisions
> involving fine details I know nothing about is one of the things that
> put me off the game after exactly one attempt to use it as a GM.
Well...
The question was raised as to why so much more detail is necessary in a
narrative resolution system than in a randomised one. I don't think it
is. In the case of Amber, we'd have any number of combats which were
simply:
"I'll attack him."
"You win. What do you want to do with the body?"
... which is not as boring as it sounds, because usually the battle you
were fighting was much more important than how it was fought. Three of us
were fencers, I wasn't. Two of us were chemists. The GM was a computer
programmer, so was (on a good day) my character. At no stage did players'
real world knowledge supersede our characters'. Basically, the characters
were assumed to know stuff that the players didn't - as happens in any
system.
Now, when two PCs, or two Amberites, were fighting, the combat was much
more involved. In one case, my character was outclassed (which we knew
before we started), and the home-shadow advantage was the only reason he
wasn't killed. It was one of the most tense and exciting battle sequences
I've ever played.
One idea I really liked was the "fields of experience" rule in James Bond.
Basically, you have one or two fields of experience (chemist, journalist,
whatever) and are assumed to be competent in that field, such that you can
do anything you want within that field, no roll necessary. Something
similar applies in Amber - if it goes with your character concept, you can
do it. If a conflict arises, it eventually defaults to an attribute.
Anyway. Better get back to work. :)
Stu.
Sakura
Stuart Barrow <bar...@chem.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
>On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
>
>> I'd say that's an arguement against narrative resolution in general,
>> personally. That fact that in Amber I routinely had to make decisions
>> involving fine details I know nothing about is one of the things that
>> put me off the game after exactly one attempt to use it as a GM.
>
>Well...
>The question was raised as to why so much more detail is necessary in a
>narrative resolution system than in a randomised one. I don't think it
>is. In the case of Amber, we'd have any number of combats which were
>simply:
>
>"I'll attack him."
>"You win. What do you want to do with the body?"
Much like the source material, really, especially when an Amberite is
fighting an inferior foe. Corwin spends 2 sentences taking care of an
armed and armored knight, breaking his back and throwing him into the
trees, and his son doesn't even bother to describe the fight he had with
the Dweller on the Threshold...(a great scene leading up to it, though...)
It's only when Amberites fight each other, or other tough customers (like
those weird grey guys that were pursuing Random in NPiA) that the battles
go into detail...
J
--
Hostes aliengeni me abduxerent. Jeff Johnston - je...@io.com
Qui annus est? http://www.io.com/~jeffj
Nightshade
>
>On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
>
>> I'd say that's an arguement against narrative resolution in general,
>> personally. That fact that in Amber I routinely had to make decisions
>> involving fine details I know nothing about is one of the things that
>> put me off the game after exactly one attempt to use it as a GM.
>
>Well...
>The question was raised as to why so much more detail is necessary in a
>narrative resolution system than in a randomised one. I don't think it
>is. In the case of Amber, we'd have any number of combats which were
>simply:
>
>"I'll attack him."
>"You win. What do you want to do with the body?"
Well, that gets into other problems I have with Amber as a game
system, personally. I don't happen to believe _any_ battle, no matter
how imbalanced is as cut and dried as the game system assumes it is
via the Warfare stat. Even for the sort of marginal superhumans and
immortals Amberites are.
>One idea I really liked was the "fields of experience" rule in James Bond.
>Basically, you have one or two fields of experience (chemist, journalist,
>whatever) and are assumed to be competent in that field, such that you can
>do anything you want within that field, no roll necessary. Something
>similar applies in Amber - if it goes with your character concept, you can
>do it. If a conflict arises, it eventually defaults to an attribute.
I quite understand the principal. I just don't agree with it.
Stuart Barrow
On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
> Stuart Barrow <bar...@chem.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
> >"You win. What do you want to do with the body?"
>
> Well, that gets into other problems I have with Amber as a game
> system, personally. I don't happen to believe _any_ battle, no matter
> how imbalanced is as cut and dried as the game system assumes it is
> via the Warfare stat. Even for the sort of marginal superhumans and
> immortals Amberites are.
This is the example in the Amber rulebook, paraphrased because I don't own
the book. :)
You know fencing (I can't remember if you did or not, but it'll do for an
example). I don't (this I know is true). If we were to square off in a
fencing bout, you'd probably have won before I'd worked out how to hold
the sword properly. This would hold true whether you'd had seven lessons
and were still in the 'beginners' section. It would be absolutely certain
if you were a state-level competitor.
However. If I had a friend explain the rules beforehand. If I'd
practiced. If you were drunk. If I rigged the machinery and bribed the
judges, if I'd fabricated evidence that you were cheating on your wife and
threatened to show it to her if I lost, if I set up spotlights to shine in
your eyes at crucial moments, If I kneed you in the testicles while the
judges I'd bribed weren't looking... then, I might have a chance.
Exactly how much I'd have to do to put the odds in my favour would depend
on our relative skill levels - even if all the above held true, I'd still
be beaten by Inigo Montoya, even if he also had a flesh wound. If we were
of approximately equal skill level, or you were willing to play as nastily
as I apparently am :), then the difference would still come down to who
was more skilled.
If you lose to someone you thought you were better than, you a) curse your
fate, fortune and circumstance (or your Bad Stuff) or b) re-evaluate your
opinion of your opponent - just like in the game.
Now - I can understand you saying that IRL knowing who is better is not
the same as knowing who will win, I'd agree. However, I don't really see
the difference, in game terms, between arbitrarily deciding the
probability and saying that the most likely event happens, and arbitrarily
deciding the probability and rolling d100 to determine what happens,
especially in a cinematic game. ("Can you remember anything happening
that wasn't _going_ to happen?" - wish I could remember the source!)
You're right. Not every battle is cut and dried. The archer in the back
row might happen to knock off a stray arrow that collects the King in the
eye. A complete novice might slip on a bit of his own blood and propel
his sword accidently through his opponent's throat. One in a million
chances crop up nine times out of ten. So a dice roll simulates this
better than GM fiat? Probably. Is it more or less satisfying? Depends
on the GM, and possibly the dice.
> >One idea I really liked was the "fields of experience" rule in James Bond.
> >Basically, you have one or two fields of experience (chemist, journalist,
> >whatever) and are assumed to be competent in that field, such that you can
> >do anything you want within that field, no roll necessary. Something
> >similar applies in Amber - if it goes with your character concept, you can
> >do it. If a conflict arises, it eventually defaults to an attribute.
>
> I quite understand the principal. I just don't agree with it.
Feng Shui (and a few other systems that aren't coming directly to mind)
mentions in passing a use of the concept you might find more acceptable.
It says, if you have the relevant skill, you can do anything reasonably
covered by that skill, given time, patience and equipment if necessary.
If conditions are less than ideal, _then_ you make a roll. Best of both
worlds, or an inadequate system that relies on fudging? You decide.
My God, I've been carrying on. I'd apologise, but if you weren't
passingly interested, you'd have deleted this by now. :)
Stu.
Nightshade
The key difference here is even in a cinematic game, I expect more
variance from expectations than I would in cinematic 'fiction'...and I
don't think the GM arbitrarily deciding it is the appropriate
mechanism.
>
>You're right. Not every battle is cut and dried. The archer in the back
>row might happen to knock off a stray arrow that collects the King in the
>eye. A complete novice might slip on a bit of his own blood and propel
>his sword accidently through his opponent's throat. One in a million
>chances crop up nine times out of ten. So a dice roll simulates this
>better than GM fiat? Probably. Is it more or less satisfying? Depends
>on the GM, and possibly the dice.
Or on what people expect from the game.
>
>> >One idea I really liked was the "fields of experience" rule in James Bond.
>> >Basically, you have one or two fields of experience (chemist, journalist,
>> >whatever) and are assumed to be competent in that field, such that you can
>> >do anything you want within that field, no roll necessary. Something
>> >similar applies in Amber - if it goes with your character concept, you can
>> >do it. If a conflict arises, it eventually defaults to an attribute.
>>
>> I quite understand the principal. I just don't agree with it.
>
>Feng Shui (and a few other systems that aren't coming directly to mind)
>mentions in passing a use of the concept you might find more acceptable.
>It says, if you have the relevant skill, you can do anything reasonably
>covered by that skill, given time, patience and equipment if necessary.
>If conditions are less than ideal, _then_ you make a roll. Best of both
>worlds, or an inadequate system that relies on fudging? You decide.
I don't mind routine tasks defaulting to 'yes' with skilled users. I
simply question whether some tasks are _every_ routine, and whether
most of the things that happen in RPGs are routine in particularly.
>
>My God, I've been carrying on. I'd apologise, but if you weren't
>passingly interested, you'd have deleted this by now. :)
If I didn't want response, I wouldn't have posted. :)
Stuart Barrow
On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
> The key difference here is even in a cinematic game, I expect more
> variance from expectations than I would in cinematic 'fiction'...and I
> don't think the GM arbitrarily deciding it is the appropriate
> mechanism.
Well... in our Amber game, the variation from expectations tended not to
come in the resolution of actions but in other events that were going on
around, above and several universes down from the action under
examination. Generally, our GM was pretty fair, and I don't think any of
us had too much of a problem with his decisions. (Except that I'd like to
think I'd have had sufficient Endurance to drag myself onto the pattern
and bleed on it, thus sacrificing myself to save the universe.)
I tried to run a game with a different setting, but similar mechanics. It
didn't work as well as I'd have liked, but I'd have to say that was more
due to my application of the mechanics than a flaw within the mechanics
themselves. To whit, your next point:
> Or on what people expect from the game.
Uh, sorry, the point after (not that this one is invalid. You're
entirely right.) :
> I don't mind routine tasks defaulting to 'yes' with skilled users. I
> simply question whether some tasks are _every_ routine, and whether
> most of the things that happen in RPGs are routine in particularly.
The problem with the game I ran was that I didn't take this into account;
I arbitrated most events as a complete success rather than the partial
success that the situation and the story might have called for.
> If I didn't want response, I wouldn't have posted. :)
Cool. I can feel that my time wasn't wasted. Well, not entirely
wasted. :)
Stu.
Nightshade
>
>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
>
>> The key difference here is even in a cinematic game, I expect more
>> variance from expectations than I would in cinematic 'fiction'...and I
>> don't think the GM arbitrarily deciding it is the appropriate
>> mechanism.
>
>Well... in our Amber game, the variation from expectations tended not to
>come in the resolution of actions but in other events that were going on
>around, above and several universes down from the action under
>examination. Generally, our GM was pretty fair, and I don't think any of
>us had too much of a problem with his decisions. (Except that I'd like to
>think I'd have had sufficient Endurance to drag myself onto the pattern
>and bleed on it, thus sacrificing myself to save the universe.)
As I've said before, it's not a GMs fairness I'm calling into question
on this (though I don't think that's a complete nonissue either) but
the fact it's going to be hard for him to introduce what I consider a
true level of unpredictability without coloring it with his campaign
wants and expectations. I won't say not possible, but I'm quite
dubious of it actually happening...and even more so of it being
believeable as such.
>
>I tried to run a game with a different setting, but similar mechanics. It
>didn't work as well as I'd have liked, but I'd have to say that was more
>due to my application of the mechanics than a flaw within the mechanics
>themselves. To whit, your next point:
>
>> Or on what people expect from the game.
>
>Uh, sorry, the point after (not that this one is invalid. You're
>entirely right.) :
>
>> I don't mind routine tasks defaulting to 'yes' with skilled users. I
>> simply question whether some tasks are _every_ routine, and whether
>> most of the things that happen in RPGs are routine in particularly.
>
>The problem with the game I ran was that I didn't take this into account;
>I arbitrated most events as a complete success rather than the partial
>success that the situation and the story might have called for.
And your last point on this is part of the problem I have, too; I'm
not in favor of the GM factoring what 'the story' might require in his
decisions on success. That's in fact one of my concerns about this
whole approach.
>
>> If I didn't want response, I wouldn't have posted. :)
>
>Cool. I can feel that my time wasn't wasted. Well, not entirely
>wasted. :)
Heh.
Stuart Barrow
On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
> As I've said before, it's not a GMs fairness I'm calling into question
> on this (though I don't think that's a complete nonissue either) but
> the fact it's going to be hard for him to introduce what I consider a
> true level of unpredictability without coloring it with his campaign
> wants and expectations. I won't say not possible, but I'm quite
> dubious of it actually happening...and even more so of it being
> believeable as such.
Mm. Dunno. I can't help but feel that a 'true level of unpredictability'
would be counter to the feel that most diceless systems try to promote,
especially Amber, in which case I'm forced to resort to the rather weak
'if you don't like it, don't play it' argument, for which I apologise.
> And your last point on this is part of the problem I have, too; I'm
> not in favor of the GM factoring what 'the story' might require in his
> decisions on success. That's in fact one of my concerns about this
> whole approach.
I don't think this is qualitatively different from a GM deciding to ignore
or modify the result of a dice-roll in order to keep a character alive, or
rearrange the layout of a dungeon so that the party reach a certain
chamber first, or have the ancient tome in Greek instead of Latin because
the professor can then recite the chant to summon the outer horror, stuff
like that. 'The story' is pretty important, when you get down to it.
Anyway,
Stu.
George W. Harris
<bar...@chem.ufl.edu> wrote thusly:
=I don't think this is qualitatively different from a GM deciding to ignore
=or modify the result of a dice-roll in order to keep a character alive, or
=rearrange the layout of a dungeon so that the party reach a certain
=chamber first, or have the ancient tome in Greek instead of Latin because
=the professor can then recite the chant to summon the outer horror, stuff
=like that. 'The story' is pretty important, when you get down to it.
Unless, of course, the story is completely
unimportant, which it is for many people. Many would
prefer that the GM not make any of the decisions you
list above, myself among them.
=Stu.
--
They say there's air in your lungs that's been there for years.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Stuart Barrow
On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, George W. Harris wrote:
> Unless, of course, the story is completely
> unimportant, which it is for many people. Many would
> prefer that the GM not make any of the decisions you
> list above, myself among them.
I've played in and run games where such decisions weren't made, and found
that they were somewhat unsatisfying. On the other hand, after what was
arguably one of the best games I've ever played, the GM grudgingly
admitted that he'd been fudging the rules mercilessly, for the sake of the
story. This is where I'm coming from, based solely on my experience. I
like Amber. I like diceless. I prefer character based games over
tactical games, but don't really mind either way.
Nightshade
>
>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Nightshade wrote:
>
>> As I've said before, it's not a GMs fairness I'm calling into question
>> on this (though I don't think that's a complete nonissue either) but
>> the fact it's going to be hard for him to introduce what I consider a
>> true level of unpredictability without coloring it with his campaign
>> wants and expectations. I won't say not possible, but I'm quite
>> dubious of it actually happening...and even more so of it being
>> believeable as such.
>
>Mm. Dunno. I can't help but feel that a 'true level of unpredictability'
>would be counter to the feel that most diceless systems try to promote,
>especially Amber, in which case I'm forced to resort to the rather weak
>'if you don't like it, don't play it' argument, for which I apologise.
Well, my attitude toward the latter is compouned by the fact that I'm
a big Amber fan and don't really think the game represents the world
all that well. :P
>
>> And your last point on this is part of the problem I have, too; I'm
>> not in favor of the GM factoring what 'the story' might require in his
>> decisions on success. That's in fact one of my concerns about this
>> whole approach.
>
>I don't think this is qualitatively different from a GM deciding to ignore
>or modify the result of a dice-roll in order to keep a character alive, or
I'm not a big fan of that, either.
>rearrange the layout of a dungeon so that the party reach a certain
>chamber first, or have the ancient tome in Greek instead of Latin because
Or either of those.
>the professor can then recite the chant to summon the outer horror, stuff
>like that. 'The story' is pretty important, when you get down to it.
Again, depends on what you're gaming for.
Nightshade
>In Sat, 26 Jun 1999 15:40:59 -0400 of yore, Stuart Barrow
><bar...@chem.ufl.edu> wrote thusly:
>
>=I don't think this is qualitatively different from a GM deciding to ignore
>=or modify the result of a dice-roll in order to keep a character alive, or
>=rearrange the layout of a dungeon so that the party reach a certain
>=chamber first, or have the ancient tome in Greek instead of Latin because
>=the professor can then recite the chant to summon the outer horror, stuff
>=like that. 'The story' is pretty important, when you get down to it.
>
> Unless, of course, the story is completely
>unimportant, which it is for many people. Many would
>prefer that the GM not make any of the decisions you
>list above, myself among them.
And I prefer that they be used, at most, very gingerly if at all.
Nightshade
>
>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, George W. Harris wrote:
>
>> Unless, of course, the story is completely
>> unimportant, which it is for many people. Many would
>> prefer that the GM not make any of the decisions you
>> list above, myself among them.
>
>I've played in and run games where such decisions weren't made, and found
>that they were somewhat unsatisfying. On the other hand, after what was
>arguably one of the best games I've ever played, the GM grudgingly
>admitted that he'd been fudging the rules mercilessly, for the sake of the
>story. This is where I'm coming from, based solely on my experience. I
>like Amber. I like diceless. I prefer character based games over
>tactical games, but don't really mind either way.
>
There's nothing about fundging the results that makes a game not
'character based'; some of the most character intensive players on
this NG utterly hate preturbing the system that way. It destroys a
significant part of their SOD.