Quote from: Elliot Wilen;633844In more straighforward terms, if it would make sense "in real life" then it should make sense in the rules.

Ideally, yes.

However I find that people now days don't have a very good feel for what makes sense and are really only interested in what benefits them. I either have to spend time retraining them, or these days just not them inviting to games.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;633844Yep. The details of modeling aiding are a whole other ball of wax. It seems, in many situations, an expert is going to benefit less from help than will a newb or journeyman. But then you have to ask if "benefit" is to be compared linearly or proportionally, etc.
 
But IMO the most important thing is to avoid penalizing things that, in real life, would be beneficial. Next is making beneficial things beneficial, which is almost the same, if there's an opportunity cost. (Like, if spending money to get information doesn't actually help get information, you're effectively penalizing it.) Next is getting the relative balance of cost:benefit right when comparing options, which is a special case of opportunity costs. Last is getting the costs:benefits literally, exactly, absolutely right.
 
In more straighforward terms, if it would make sense "in real life" then it should make sense in the rules.

I think its realistic that the expert might occasionally tell the newbie to not help, and there could be instances where its difficult to tell if they would help. IRL of course, exact percentages of success aren't as easily determinable as they are in most RPGs, and the expert has to go off past experience and their best judgment as to whether that's OK.
I guess pulling out the calculators to work out exact percentages probably goes beyond that and falls into the realm of using metagame information to pick the PC approach to solving a problem.
 
Sometimes it may be possible to mitigate this by having who's helping be chosen before the GM assigns exact difficulty (letting them learn from their mistakes the next time they Voltron their skill check), other games like dice pool games can have probabilities that are already inscrutable to most players.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;633855I guess pulling out the calculators to work out exact percentages probably goes beyond that and falls into the realm of using metagame information to pick the PC approach to solving a problem.

Well...

I'm not a big one about pulling out a calculator to determine what one should do in a game, but I wouldn't really call it meta-gaming to do so. The game mechanics are an interface that stands-in as whatever they are representing- so a player's knowledge and use of them is in a very important way a stand-in for the character's knowledge and experience.

While in-game a Demolition Expert is reviewing all his training, previous experience, and his current estimates of the maker of the bomb he's defusing- the player (who knows nothing about Demolitions) is working the numbers. Both character and player are therefore performing to the best of their ability to solve the problem at hand.

That said, I don't think one should reach for mechanical systems where things might be an advantage with some target numbers, and not others.

Its hard to know where to draw the line exactly.
Some good points I think, although there isn't necessary a good correlation between the player and character skill - in the given example it works, but potentially a character may have no knowledge of of a skill, & a player who can calculate target numbers quite well.

I don't understand what you mean with your last point, sorry.

QuoteThat said, I don't think one should reach for mechanical systems where things might be an advantage with some target numbers, and not others.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;633958but potentially a character may have no knowledge of of a skill, & a player who can calculate target numbers quite well.

This is true, but there are two things that should keep the problem in check.

The first is the simple fact that if the character doesn't have any knowledge of the skill- the player has nothing to work with.

The second is of course role-playing restraint on the part of the player. He should know (and the GM enforce) not to act out of character.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;633958I don't understand what you mean with your last point, sorry.

It was a little confusing.

Basically what I'm saying is that playing with the numbers is a valid transfer of a character skill to something the player can do. But I personally don't like the method and instead like to have modifiers be simply intuitive and consistent.

Fair enough.
 
Anyway, another general question for anyone still here relating to internal/external failures...should 'external' failures be worse than failures just due to lack of skill?
 
If the GM has (by whatever reason) determined that a truck is coming through the intersection, should that have worse consequences than a normal failure. How free should the GM be when setting consequences...strictly fluff only, mechanical consequences to failing PC, mechanical consequences to whole party?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;634012Anyway, another general question for anyone still here relating to internal/external failures...should 'external' failures be worse than failures just due to lack of skill?

The Indiana Jones school of skill failure says that when the rope breaks you fall into a nest of asps. Very Dangerous (tm).

And we have been talking about critical failures being external for the most part.

However one doesn't have to make an automatic external failure a critical one, you can still keep them split apart (have external/internal failures and critical external/internal failures). That's how I'd go.

Is an odd question 'cos I'm trying to tackle it from a different angle, and also check my basic assumptions.
We have talked most about critical failures, but I'm pondering now and sometimes an 'external' failure will tend to happen just because the GM has a good idea for one.
An example from one of my games (which are usually pretty weird) is when someone attempted a Scrying attempt on a bad guy, and got a critical failure. What the PCs didn't know, at the time, was that he actually had an exact double (due to him being cut in half earlier in the game, and having regeneration) - I had the scrying attempt work, but they got a vision of the other duplicate. In a sense that didn't handicap the PCs, and might even have benefited them (giving them information they didn't already have, however irrelevant) but it was largely fiat in that it happened just because I could think of something.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;634319In a sense that didn't handicap the PCs, and might even have benefited them (giving them information they didn't already have, however irrelevant) but it was largely fiat in that it happened just because I could think of something.

Now we're getting to how individual GMs would deal with things, and that becomes more a matter of personal tastes and the GM's setting.

I would have approached it differently, in that I would think that the spell likely couldn't tell the difference between the two even if it worked- and had success give a view of one of the two targets at random (or perhaps the one who had the most original parts).

A critical failure on the other hand is something that should work against the players, in my game that would be the target becoming aware of the attempt with who, what and why information.

But all that is details of magic contained in the details of the setting. I don't think there is a right or wrong answer here.