It is not that I missed your point. It is that your point misses the obvious and natural responses. If the players suddenly and out of the blue say, "You know what we really want to do is have our characters form a circus."

GM: So how are you going to do that?

Just getting the players to plan how they are going to form a circus can easily take a good part of a session. While they are doing their planning, the GM can start doing his or her planning. Starting the first steps of their plans can easily take the rest of the session. Given typical rates of play of one session per week, the GM now has an entire week to think about what to do with a circus and to do their planning. This is hardly, planning on the fly. And if by some chance the players immediately respond with a plan requiring lots of GM input the GM can say,

GM: I didn't know you were going to decide to form a circus. I'm glad you have a plan, but I'm not prepared to respond to your plan tonight so we'll have to end early and take this up next session.

Problem solved. Being a GM is not rocket science or brain surgery or being some sort of improvisational wizard. All that is required is a moderate amount of time and effort, a moderate amount of creativity, and a moderate intelligence. If you can't provide those you should not be the GM.

Quote from: Manzanaro;894853Hey... What happened to that "don't teach a pig to sing" thing? It was both an excellent parting shot, and something that made me say, "about fucking time!"

Your singing lesson is just an odd artifact of the site update teething period. Things will return to normal soon.

Quote from: Saurondor;894778It might be immaterial to you,

No. It's immaterial. Period. As in you're just using a value-loaded term under the pretense that your opinion is somehow objective. I get it you don't like it. And that's all that's relevant. Incongruous to you doesn't mean anything to anyone else.

Quotebut not to me. I'm not opting for things that I don't like, that's why I did my own research and developed my own game mechanics, which is a whole lot more that what it appears you've done.

It would be ignorant of you to assume that just because I haven't presented something more that I haven't done something more. However, in this case, I stated explicitly that the system I was presenting was only for the sake of illustrating a few key points and is not the one I actually use. Given that I stated that, you're just being plain dishonest here, so I'm calling bullshit.

QuoteSo you'd disagree with me even if I was right?

No. I disagree with your statement that I was disagreeing with you on grounds that "that's not how I like to do things." The grounds on which I was disagreeing with you is that, you are in fact, not right at all. I went through point by point. You were wrong on all of them except for the fact that I disagree.

QuoteYes, my attacks on him after being attacked by him with full damaging potential.

Says who?

QuoteI win the initiative, I make a good attack roll, I deliver a good amount of damage, and still I run the risk of death or serious injury exactly as if I had NOT hit him.

Not true. But whatever.

QuoteBecause it's not only about translating into more damage. Translating skill into damage also involves less damage if the task is to hard for the skill at hand. When you say : you're looking at 12 as your very minimum damage you're talking about the sum of the weapon damage plus the bonus from skill (If you have 50 skill ). Now I can go against an easy opponent against which I have 70% chance of a hit, a "normal" opponent with 50% chance of hitting, a hard opponent with 25% chance of hitting and an epic opponent against which I have only a 5% of hitting, yet if I hit the minimum I can deliver is 12 points.

Says who? Again, you are the only one saying this. You who find this problematic are for some reason the one opting to do this. Since hit and damage are in separate rolls, you have the option to modify one, the other, both, or neither.

What does it mean to have a 50% chance of hitting a normal opponent? Remember, my system isn't jumping straight to probability distribution. The distribution is a composite. There are several ways I can get a 50% hit result. A slightly below average starting soldier using a short sword or a slightly below average starting knight using a great sword, for example, both hit 50% of the time but have different probability distributions reflecting different training, background, and fighting styles.

The soldier: Hits 50% of the time (3.5% kill + 46.5% wound), completely misses 27% of the time, and does "something else" 23% of the time.
The knight: Hits 50% of the time (18.5% kill + 31.5% wound) and completely misses 50% of the time.

Likewise "easy to hit" and "hard to hit" can mean a lot of different things. Switching to one particular type of "easy to hit" would bring the distributions to:

The Soldier: Hits 73% of the time (5.5% kill +67.5% wound) and completely misses 73% of the time.
The knight: Hits 50% of the time (always killing) and misses 50% of the time.

A different type of "easy to hit" however makes the new distribution look like this:

The soldier: Hits 65% of the time (18.5% kill + 46.5% wound), completely misses 12% of the time, and does "something else" 23% of the time.
The knight: Hits 65% of the time (33.5% kill + 31.5% wound) and completely misses 35% of the time.

Again, the brilliance of the system is with extraordinarily simple rules--rules simpler than what you propose--the number of possibilities, nuance, and exacting response to a very specific situation (rather than generic designations of "easy to hit" or "hard to hit") is vastly superior to the system you propose.

Ok Lunamancer, and how does this system allow for better narrative and in what way does it address the issue Manzanaro raised regarding the protagonists and the stormtroopers?

Quote from: Saurondor;894879Ok Lunamancer, and how does this system allow for better narrative

See my reply to manzanaro, specifically the 4 versions of the fighter attacking the ogre.

The key is being specific. Not generic.

Quoteand in what way does it address the issue Manzanaro raised regarding the protagonists and the stormtroopers?

It doesn't. You're looking in the wrong place to address that. The fact is, it doesn't matter how all-powerful the galatic empire may be. They still face scarcity. They can't go blasting every piece of garbage that goes floating through space. It may not be sexy. It may not be featured on screen. But in a well-simulated world, this is true nonetheless. It's easy for us to say in hindsight, "Well, gosh, they should have just blasted everything." Because what we don't see is the alternate timeline in which they do make a practice of shooting space debris, just to be safe, and lose a key battle to the separatists due to resource shortages prior to episode 6. That wouldn't have made A New Hope a great film either.

The stormtroopers did scan the escape pod. They found no life on board. It's a reasonable and practical measure. To system or strategy is foolproof. It doesn't mean there was a better way to go about things. And even if they were, stormtroopers aren't necessarily the epitome of good judgment. Yet it still makes sense that they'd be expected to make those sorts of judgment calls. That's why the empire used them in lieu of droids. Because they can make judgment calls. I guess in war, the sufficient number of commanders to make macro-managing every decision of a droid army can be hard to come by. Once again, scarcity. Just because it's not on screen doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I mean the lucky shot that takes out the protagonist, not the pod issue I brought up.

By the way, regarding the four examples I did notice foot stepping and impact of that action and it surprises me that you endorse it then but not in my case. So stepping on somebody's foot has and effect, but putting a 9 mil to the chest and depleting 90% of all hit points calls for no side effect. Odd

Quote from: Bren;894869It is not that I missed your point. It is that your point misses the obvious and natural responses. If the players suddenly and out of the blue say, "You know what we really want to do is have our characters form a circus."

GM: So how are you going to do that?

Just getting the players to plan how they are going to form a circus can easily take a good part of a session. While they are doing their planning, the GM can start doing his or her planning. Starting the first steps of their plans can easily take the rest of the session. Given typical rates of play of one session per week, the GM now has an entire week to think about what to do with a circus and to do their planning. This is hardly, planning on the fly. And if by some chance the players immediately respond with a plan requiring lots of GM input the GM can say,

GM: I didn't know you were going to decide to form a circus. I'm glad you have a plan, but I'm not prepared to respond to your plan tonight so we'll have to end early and take this up next session.

Problem solved. Being a GM is not rocket science or brain surgery or being some sort of improvisational wizard. All that is required is a moderate amount of time and effort, a moderate amount of creativity, and a moderate intelligence. If you can't provide those you should not be the GM.

Your singing lesson is just an odd artifact of the site update teething period. Things will return to normal soon.

But get this Bren: I'm not saying GMing is hard. That is not my point in any way. So your continued references to it not being rocket science and certain people (who knows who you mean?) shouldn't be GMs if they can't roll like you roll are just kind of weirdly out of place.

Instead I am looking at how we approach it. Earlier you talked about creating a table of random circus events, which I would consider to be a simulation based approach; now you seem to be talking about apparently planning out events, which I would consider to be you "authoring" events (there's that word you love!).

For the record? I wouldn't call either approach bad, and in fact, part of my point in this example was that it is impossible to run a game that is 100% simulation, because a sandbox does not represent a complete model of the gameworld. "Where can we buy canvas? Where can we get an elephant or the fantasy world equivalent?" Chances are there are going to be questions which don't have answers in your preexisting model. So what do you do? You step outside your delineated model and you author the answers. You make them up. And then you start making up events to keep the whole thing interesting. Again, to keep the emergent narrative interesting you author events.

Now, of course, you will complain I am using weighted words or equivocating or whatever and that making up events to keep things interesting is absolutely a form of simulation. And you will still fail to see how useless and all encompassing that makes your definition of 'simulation'.

And by the way? Whether you make those events up on the spot or over the course of a week doesn't really change things does it?

Quote from: Manzanaro;894932For the record? I wouldn't call either approach bad, and in fact, part of my point in this example was that it is impossible to run a game that is 100% simulation, because a sandbox does not represent a complete model of the gameworld. "Where can we buy canvas? Where can we get an elephant or the fantasy world equivalent?" Chances are there are going to be questions which don't have answers in your preexisting model.

A sandbox can most certainly be 100% simulation. Flight simulators don't simulate the weather on the whole planet,  just that weather that affects the airplane. Nor do they stimulate all flights in the world, only those that can affect the flight being simulated. From that perspective I see no reason not to call a sandbox a 100% simulation.

Authoring can be a valid source of events in a simulation as long as it plays along with the simulation.  Not very 'simulationist' if you find  an electronics shop in a fantasy setting as you walk down the street, but very simulationist if it's a magic shop, and even this can be out of tune depending on the setting. If it's low magic setting it may not fit the simulationist definition either.

Quote from: Saurondor;894899I mean the lucky shot that takes out the protagonist, not the pod issue I brought up.

??

I'm not sure there is a problem. Not a system one, anyway. I've observed over the years many players who which to play heroes like they see in the movies but they don't want act like the heroes in the movie. How are the Ewoks supposed to bailout the party's ass on the moon of Endor if the party decided to fight them after being cut down from the net?

PCs dying due to unforeseen misfortune? Meh. How much of that is due to what you were arguing earlier regarding information theory--that if something is 99 out of 100 probable, then less information is gained from the roll because you have a greater degree of knowledge about it beforehand? I said the knowledge is false and the belief in the knowledge is foolish. If you proceed as if you know the 99% is going to happen, you chalk that 1 in 100 chance up to luck. And all of a sudden it's some problem the game system has to solve. However, if you proceed as if you don't know, you prepare for that 1%. And this is chalked up as dramatic coincidence, deus ex machina, or protagonist script immunity.

And even failing that, how do you define "protagonist." If Princess Leia had died at the beginning of the movie in the attack on her ship, would she have been considered a protagonist? Protagonists in part are selected according to a survival bias. They have to live long enough to play a major part in the story. Player characters are only ever guaranteed to be the protagonists of their own story. Not *the* story.

Quote from: Saurondor;894905By the way, regarding the four examples I did notice foot stepping and impact of that action and it surprises me that you endorse it then but not in my case. So stepping on somebody's foot has and effect, but putting a 9 mil to the chest and depleting 90% of all hit points calls for no side effect. Odd

Yes. It is odd that you would play that way. I seem to recall mentioning the shock harm rule. Which is triggered by a specific attack. Not by simply being at some arbitrary number of hit points. Notice, it's the attack that stuns the ogre. Not the number of hit points the ogre has which didn't even get a mention in my example.

Quote from: Saurondor;894942A sandbox can most certainly be 100% simulation. Flight simulators don't simulate the weather on the whole planet,  just that weather that affects the airplane. Nor do they stimulate all flights in the world, only those that can affect the flight being simulated. From that perspective I see no reason not to call a sandbox a 100% simulation.

Authoring can be a valid source of events in a simulation as long as it plays along with the simulation.  Not very 'simulationist' if you find  an electronics shop in a fantasy setting as you walk down the street, but very simulationist if it's a magic shop, and even this can be out of tune depending on the setting. If it's low magic setting it may not fit the simulationist definition either.

Firstly, you are right. A game of limited enough scope can be true 100% simulation. However, I am not sure a flight simulator is a good example when it comes to TYRPGs. I don't imagine too many TTRPGs aspire to that depth and accuracy of simulation.

Secondly, realism is nothing to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that having magic or dragons or superpowers disqualifies something as simulation due to those things not being real. And the idea that any TTRPG has "realistic" mechanics is pretty far fetched if you ask me, though the OUTCOMES of the mechanics may often carry, or be imbued with, a sense of verisimilitude.

Quote from: Lunamancer;894946Yes. It is odd that you would play that way. I seem to recall mentioning the shock harm rule. Which is triggered by a specific attack. Not by simply being at some arbitrary number of hit points. Notice, it's the attack that stuns the ogre. Not the number of hit points the ogre has which didn't even get a mention in my example.

Odd? In what way? So you say it's because the player triggered the effect through a specific attack? It's not the product of the simulation itself? So putting a nine mil on somebody's chest and delivering 90% (or any percent for that matter ) is different from putting a nine mil on somebody's chest with the added annotation of "a specific attack"? Does the rifling change? Does the bullet get soft?  Does it transmutate into plastic in mid flight? The player is clearly authoring the effect here beyond the scope of the simulation. How's that so? Could you explain please.

Quote from: Manzanaro;894951Secondly, realism is nothing to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that having magic or dragons or superpowers disqualifies something as simulation due to those things not being real. And the idea that any TTRPG has "realistic" mechanics is pretty far fetched if you ask me, though the OUTCOMES of the mechanics may often carry, or be imbued with, a sense of verisimilitude.

Well yea, anymore than jet engines and TV's are real in a fantasy setting. The outcomes though should be like you say: with a sense of verisimilitude.

It's this need for verisimilitude that makes me find the human element in the simulation so important. It's the human that breaks away from the constraints of a console game and create a living world. It's the human, not the machine nor a simulation run in a machine, that can create new tables and lists of options against which dice can be rolled. It's the mind that's adding all this 'randomness'. Without the random encounter tables created be humans the die rolls are just numbers.

Picking up on the points regarding information, I've come to believe that the actual role of player and dice input is inverted. Players are and should be more random than dice. Not that players should say any random thought and turn the adventure into pure chaos, no not that. What I'm saying is that dice should back up player decisions, and players have a much broader range of choices and are usually not limited by yes or no answers. You don't pick your player choices from the random player choices table, you have a much broader spectrum of choices available to you, way more than a die roll can address.

Taking your protagonist and stormtrooper example. If the player makes a good decision and the character is good at the task at hand then the dice should not kill the protagonist. On the other hand if the player does something stupid the dice should not save the protagonist. The dice add that bit of randomness that makes the story interesting, but they should not have more power than the player. Sure, you can have sporadic bad luck, but this should be the exception and not the norm.

This is contrary to what Lunamancer is trying to sell us thought the usage of his great marketing skills by making clear cut statements denying my position without actually backing them up. For example if you make a good attack roll you should do good damage and if you do a bad die roll you should do little damage.

If I stand far from my opponent because I don't want to get close and personal (tactical decision not to risk my character), and I fire an arrow, according to his rules you do at least 11 points of damage, one for the arrow and ten from skill. This is regardless if you roll the minimum required to hit or not. Somehow, no matter how far, I always hit the target's head and do all this damage. Even if I can only hit on a 19 or 20, I never hit the arm or the leg for one our two points of damage,  it's always at least 11. Which is great, unless you're the target of the attack and then we can see how easily your protagonist can get killed by such a rule.

Turning the tables around, you're the player seeing this skilled trooper far away. You figure it's safe to run across the hallway. Moving target, far away, tough shot, worst case you take a wound to the shoulder. You move, the trooper requires a 19, the GM rolls and gets a 19, the minimum to hit and you're not hit on the shoulder, or hand, or lower leg. No. You're hit for 11 points and the protagonist goes down. I'm sure he'll come up with a reason it makes sense to him, but to me this is a total loss of verisimilitude. It's not what I expect. It's random, and not random in the sense of some obscure theory, it's random as in WTF JUST HAPPENED?!?!

Quote from: Saurondor;894953Odd? In what way? So you say it's because the player triggered the effect through a specific attack? It's not the product of the simulation itself? So putting a nine mil on somebody's chest and delivering 90% (or any percent for that matter ) is different from putting a nine mil on somebody's chest with the added annotation of "a specific attack"? Does the rifling change? Does the bullet get soft?  Does it transmutate into plastic in mid flight? The player is clearly authoring the effect here beyond the scope of the simulation. How's that so? Could you explain please.

Explain to you? No. Because I already explained it adequately and you still got it wrong. That's because right now you're motivation is not to understand but to find flaw.

Quote from: Lunamancer;894978Explain to you? No. Because I already explained it adequately and you still got it wrong. That's because right now you're motivation is not to understand but to find flaw.

You've explained many things regarding the example, but you haven't addressed the player authoring point which is the essence of the question. That has not been addressed by you. Please answer.

Quote from: Saurondor;894962For example if you make a good attack roll you should do good damage and if you do a bad die roll you should do little damage.

I’ve seen a number of folks get hung up on this point. In game systems that use separate rolls to hit and for damage and especially where the to hit roll determines a binary result of hit or miss, rolling a good hit on the to hit roll doesn’t mean what you think it means. It means the same thing that a roll that barely hits means. It means you hit. Now roll to see how much damage your hit did.

It may not be intuitive to your way of thinking. You may not like it. You might prefer different rules.

But from a system standpoint, that is what the roll means. If you need a 13 or better on D20 and there are no critical hits in the system (which is how OD&D worked) then rolling a 13, a 19, or a 20 mean the exact same thing. “You hit.” None of those rolls is better than nor worse than the others. If you want to know if the 19 was actually a good hit (i.e. it did a lot of damage), then you need to see what you rolled on the damage dice. Which are, as you point out, independent of the roll to hit in such a system.

QuoteTurning the tables around, you're the player seeing this skilled trooper far away. You figure it's safe to run across the hallway. Moving target, far away, tough shot, worst case you take a wound to the shoulder. You move, the trooper requires a 19, the GM rolls and gets a 19, the minimum to hit and you're not hit on the shoulder, or hand, or lower leg. No. You're hit for 11 points and the protagonist goes down. I'm sure he'll come up with a reason it makes sense to him, but to me this is a total loss of verisimilitude. It's not what I expect. It's random, and not random in the sense of some obscure theory, it's random as in WTF JUST HAPPENED?!?!

What happened is that you allowed your incorrect intuition of how the system works and what each roll represents to give you a false expectation of the likely outcome.

Quote from: Manzanaro;894932Instead I am looking at how we approach it. Earlier you talked about creating a table of random circus events, which I would consider to be a simulation based approach; now you seem to be talking about apparently planning out events, which I would consider to be you "authoring" events (there's that word you love!).

That’s because you appear not to know what GM planning is other than the sort of scene framing and authoring that script writers engage in.

Planning as a GM might include things like –

• Figuring out current or average ticket prices for circus attendance. (How much can the PCs likely charge per ticket.)
• Determining a reasonable range of % of population attending a show. (How many tickets will they sell per person.)
• If you don’t already know it, the population of nearby communities.
• Whether there are competing circuses in the region and if so how many.
• How good are the acts in those circuses.
• What resources do those circuses have and what might they want and need.
• What resources does the players circus have and what might they want and need.
• Which of these sorts of things one might plan out depends on what kind of a circus campaign you are planning on running. Which goes back to asking the players what their plan is. Presumably they have some plan. If they don’t, then step one is helping them to create a plan so that you can plan.

QuoteFor the record? I wouldn't call either approach bad, and in fact, part of my point in this example was that it is impossible to run a game that is 100% simulation, because a sandbox does not represent a complete model of the gameworld.

Yes you’ve made your belief that the incompleteness of any starting simulation requires authoring in some literary sense. Whereas, in fact, in no more requires authoring than does the creation of the initial simulation. If you didn’t allow for the possibility of running a circus campaign when you created your game world then you have two choices if you want to keep running a sandbox setting. Don’t run a circus campaign since you don't know how to simulate circus-y things or expand your campaign, i.e. your simulation, so you can run a circus campaign. You appear to think the fact that you didn’t include every possible thing in the initial set up is some sort of revelation or important point. It is not. It is basic GMing 101. No one includes everything.

QuoteChances are there are going to be questions which don't have answers in your preexisting model. So what do you do? You step outside your delineated model and you author the answers. You make them up.

Well I could step outside the model and author things if I wanted to tell stories or run missions. If I want to run a sandbox, then I add rules for running a circus to the world simulation since that is now what these players want the campaign to be about. That way I can keep running a sandbox that includes what the PCs are doing.

Again, this is GMing 101. It is how D&D ended up with rules for naval and aerial combat and costs to build a fortress. Those activities came up in play so the DMs of the time created or borrowed rules to simulate those things. It’s similar to the reason that Pendragon has rules for births, some natural deaths, and determining agricultural surpluses on a manor (because those things are important and relevant to a generational campaign where the PCs are knights and barons) and Runequest 2 (where the PCs were landless adventurers) did not.

QuoteAnd by the way? Whether you make those events up on the spot or over the course of a week doesn't really change things does it?

When one makes up events on the spot, they are less likely to simulate a world in motion and more likely to try the first thing that sounds fun, follow some literary or cinematic contrivances, or reinforce their preconceived notion of what was supposed to happen next. That changes things because the more you do that instead of expanding the scope of the simulation, the less what you are running is a sandbox. By allowing time to think about how one might run a circus campaign generally and as a sandbox rather than only what you think in the moment should happen next, one is more likely to succeed at simulation rather than auctorially selecting a circus story to play out.