Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM

(Shortened for brevity.)

So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid.  If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).  So a mechanic to address a Session Zero problem.  And, outside of a few rare cases (which you don't need to recount, because a few singular examples don't disprove the general trend), skill tests just seem to be meant to make the useless character in combat seem to have a purpose, even when they don't...

The technical word for this is opportunity cost. Spending a turn doing a support action means you lose the opportunity to do the next best thing, which is attacking and moving the encounter towards completion. If the attack always moves the encounter towards completion faster, then the opportunity cost of the support action outweighs the benefit.

This is an internal balance fault. I think the actual problem here is that the game isn't designed to need support actions; they are tacked onto a game which is fundamentally designed to be "I swing, you swing." If you are going to need support actions, you have to design them into the game at the ground level to need support actions. It's really hard to hack or homebrew fixes because you really need to make the game use them at the foundation.

My homebrew system isn't exactly a perfect way to avoid this, but I did design it with this problem in mind.

Selection's core gameplay loop is similar to a classic dungeon crawl where player HP resets after a long rest with a twist; the antagonist has schemes playing out in the world and whenever the players take a long rest, the antagonist gets free plot advancement on schemes the players already know about. My point is that, like a classic dungeon crawl, you can reduce the adventure to a string of encounters, and the players can get punished pretty viciously for taking too many long rests. This isn't a game about simply winning encounters; it's a game about trying to avoid damage. Taking damage forces you to take a long rest, which in turn gives the antagonist plot progress.

Now comes combat design. Selection has four health pools, each matching to an attribute. Invest a lot in Strength, you have a large Frame health pool. Your character has a lot of Agility? You have Nerve health. This means that some attacks pose no real threat to some characters and are immediately lethal threats to others. The idea is to encourage tanking, where players with a lot of health and DR in the correct type jump into the path of an attack aimed at a character with a small health pool and DR score.

Selection doesn't have healing magic. Its a fundamental limitation of magic in the setting that magic doesn't interact with biology. Instead, what you get are Intercept Spells, which apply flash Damage Reduction to a character while an attack is pending.

You put them together and you wind up with players constantly threat assessing attacks. "That's not dangerous. That's not dangerous. That attack is an immediate threat of character death; you jump into the path so it only deals some damage, and then I'll cast Frame Interceptor so it doesn't deal enough damage to force a long rest."


Is this perfect? No. Retraining players to jump into the path of an attack is a challenging bit of GMing, so this combat flow struggles to click with players. But it is an example of how you make support abilities necessary; you design the game from the beginning to require support abilities.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 16, 2023, 07:00:32 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 16, 2023, 05:58:37 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 16, 2023, 01:39:07 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

This is more OSR revisionism. I don't know if the first printing OD&D books had them, but pretty much every old edition D&D I have seen, including Basic, had XP for killing monsters. And a lot of these are late 70s/early 80s books that came out years before video game RPGs became popular enough for TTRPGs to feel the pressure of copying them. And TTRPGs evolved out of wargaming to boot, which are pretty much games about faceless troops slaughtering other faceless troops. So the idea that wargamers would be adverse to slaughtering enemies as part of their win strategy or even as part of what they found fun in the game is absurd on the face of it.

Plus like I mentioned in my post above: Monsters ALSO have treasure. If you let them run you miss out on that loot XP. So you have to kill or incapacitate them (which in AFAIK is only possible in old D&D through certain spells, which allow a save, since the only other way to down an enemy is to get them to 0 HP, which in older editions means death) to get that XP award. And I've yet to hear any convincing case for why getting XP through Treasure, specifically, as opposed to ANY other means (like good planning, completing objectives, actual training, etc.) is somehow the most exalted method of advancement. And every other method is just a terribad affliction on the hobby. Cuz obviously being rich is the right way to "develop" your character.

It's called "math."  The modules (which many folks used as metrics, even if they didn't run them for players) had a much higher amount of gold than monster xp (especially if you use the gp value of items found, which is isuggested n the DMG).  So in AD&D at least, you'd go up much faster by treasure than by killing monsters, and burgling monster lairs, etc. is far less dangerous that killing them straight up (and lair treasure is much better than the pocket change on the monster).  Sure, we killed stuff, but a 1000 gp haul did more than a half-dozen monsters at low level.  So this was not "revisionism."  It's the way almost all of the groups I was a part of in the early eighties played.  If you weren't there, you don't know...

Except that it is revisionist, because the quoted post made claims about XP for killing coming from video games when it in fact started with D&D. And now you're moving the goalposts to add these additional claims about old D&D modules effectively granting more XP for treasure than for killing stuff with the way they were set up. But that still doesn't dispute the original claims. Or mean that that's the way that the game was played everywhere, particularly given how DIY the hobby is supposed to be, specially early on. Or even answer the bolded portion of my post about why progression needs to revolve around getting XP for treasure specifically, as opposed to any other number of things XP/progression could revolve around, like strategy, completing objectives, clever solutions, actual training, overcoming obstacles, etc.

Of ALL the non-combat things that could be used to handle progression it always has to come back to treasure for the OSR. Like treasure isn't already a reward by virtue of being treasure. And like grabbing loot in and of itself has any connection to getting better at stuff, outside of it being strictly a game convention that applies specifically to old D&D.

It basically amounts to: "It was that way in the old days. Therefore that's the best way to handle it and everything else is only a disgrace to the hobby."

And this isn't even getting into whether or not getting XP for killing is necessarily a bad thing, which I'm not sure it is. I just think that there should be other means of progression as well. But treasure specifically isn't one I'd consider, because it bears no relation to actually getting good at anything, and it's already a tangible reward. So getting it shouldn't be a basis for getting additional intangible rewards, like XP. Stuff like actually overcoming challenges should be. And that includes combat, but it should include alternate means of overcoming obstacles as well.

Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific. Rewarding quest completion is the only way to progress character levels without incentivizing a particular approach to overcoming obstacle.

Quote from: Itachi on June 16, 2023, 07:23:05 PM
The OP seems to come from a pretty narrow premise of wargames/skirmish-derived combat. One where the rules only give weight to direct physical attacks and everything else is either undervaluated or reliant on GM fiat (or both), which is true for games like D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc.

But there are LOTS of games that don't follow that mold, and actually favor non-direct physical attacks, or at least make them on par with other kinds of interactions. Like those that turn atributes into "mental hit points", or use abstract damage currencies like "stress", and allow verbal or psychological interactions to be as effective as physical ones (like Cortex, FATE, Mutant Y0, etc). Also, games that have clear cut/non-fiat based social rules like Exalted, Blades in the Dark and PbtA, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc.

It's really not about "combat" per se at all, but rather underlying principle of mathematics and game design. If your game system has a depleting resource which is a win condition then directly depleting that resource is usually going to be optimal. You have to actually do design work to make that not the optimal choice.

I'm honestly not sure what the OP is even talking about here.

I'm hearing if the goal is to end combat quickly, then you gotta go for damage. It's just that there are so many obvious counterexamples, I feel like I must be missing something.

I'm also not quite sure what to make of the pre-empting of certain arguments. It really feels like there's some shenanigans going on, where the conclusion is being smuggled through all these weird stipulations.

I can just speak to my experience. It's almost standard operating procedure in most Lejendary Adventure groups that you want to have a mage use QuickTime. It's basically just like Haste in D&D. Doubling the attacks of your front line fighters seems to be a "help" that speeds combat along. For sure, it's going to cut way down on the in-game time. But also if enemies are now only getting half as many attacks in relative terms, even in out-of-game time, you're getting through combat quicker by eroding away some of the enemy attacks. I'm pretty sure the only reason Haste is not used compulsively like this in AD&D is because the year of aging, which of course is a variable external to combat.

Now this is something all the cats I game with get. It's unanimous that this works and is effective. And that's worth something because not all of them are very astute when it comes to analyzing such things.

One time I was playing an Elementalist rather than a Mage. So I didn't have QuickTime. Instead, I used attack like Wind Lasso. The Low-Moderate version was castable in a single round and would bind an enemy for two rounds. Eh, big whoop, right? I mean I could technically alternate aiming it at two different enemies. And assuming I make all my checks (which I won't), at best I could keep two of them tied up at the expense of not being able to contribute to the party's damage. And this actually upset some of the dimmer-witted players in the group who felt my character wasn't contributing.

Thing is, not all enemies are homogenous goo. Sometimes there's one that hits substantially harder than the others. And by zeroing in on that one, I could actually take out a huge chunk of the enemies aggregate fire power. And that means all those dull-witted players who min-maxed prioritizing their offensive abilities over their defensive abilities are now not getting taken out by the big bad, and instead get to keep on dishing out their awesome offense.

Counterfactuals are invisible, and dimwits often have no concept of what would have been. Had my Elementalist not been there, dedicated on keeping the big bad from attacking, the front line with their first-rate offense, second-rate defense might have been in part or in full wiped out. And then all their damage dealing goes bye bye. What I was doing was every bit as effective as QuickTime. It's just less obvious.

And so I can't help but wonder if the OP isn't making that mistake that is so easy to make.

I dunno. Weird stipulations. Like if having low hit points is an edge case, then I would say a pretty large percentage of what happens in combat is "edge case." Which of course means none of it is really edge case, and it's just shenanigans to call it as such.

When I analyze 1E, look, if you know orcs are going around dealing d6 damage, then the difference between 6 and 7 hit points isn't just having 16.7% more hit points. It's having a guaranteed one-hit safety buffer. And yeah, I know it's not 5E, which gives more hit points. Then again, it also doesn't have crits. And it also isn't giving Strength bonuses to orcs. What exactly is an orcs max damage accounting for improved weapon damage, strength bonus, and crit multiplier? If 20 is the new 6 in terms of hit points, but also 20 is the new 6 in terms of maximum damage an orc can deal, then we're still qualitatively talking about the exact same thing. Maybe just different odds of it happening.

Anyway, when crybabies complain about 1E, "Waaah, waaah, why does my 1st level magic-user only get to do one thing but the fighter gets infinite swings," I say, well, really, the fighter only gets to do one thing, too. His one thing is to take a hit without dying. More than the fancy swords and armor, hit points is really what makes the fighter so effective. Because once he's below 7 hit points, he's a potential one-hit-kill, and standing toe to toe with things swinging a sword no longer seems like a great idea anymore. His spot light time is essentially over. Unless a cleric hits him with a heal and puts him back in the fight.

Like I say, if we're going to allow the parameters of the discussion to be such that this is called an edge case, there's no discussion to be had. Everything is an edge case, and we can all pack up and go home.

Because it's not just a hit point edge case. Let's talk about incapacitation. Because if you can incapacitate all your enemies at once, then when that last one goes down, that's not just increasing the quantity of enemies incapacitated by one. That's a qualitative shift to coup de grace-ville. Is that an edge case, too?

Absolute statements may make people reeee. But at least they're clear and concise. I wish there were a clear and concise statement of what's even being claimed here.

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PM
Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific.

That's more of an ad hoc justification for getting XP for gold than the way things really work in reality. Actual on the ground experience is a much more effective way to hone skills and overall competence than living a pampered lifestyle (what people actually do when they have loads of money) or doing theoretical work. The only exception being if you're completely ignorant and are learning an entirely new thing outside your realm of experience. In which case you might need some schooling.

But even to the degree that a link between training and progression might exist, I don't think that it's the most central part. And there's no direct link between amount of money on hand, or specifically found during an adventure, and the quality of training you might get.

If being affluent on its own guaranteed skill development, people in the US would be the most competent people in human history. Instead they're being surpassed by places like India and China (granted, there are different factors why that's the case). And there's an overabundance of overly educated morons with crap like gender studies degrees, or who don't even have enough competency coming out of highschool.

The most competent people in the world are those who are out there doing things. Not those locked inside a classroom.

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PMRewarding quest completion is the only way to progress character levels without incentivizing a particular approach to overcoming obstacle.

You could just award the same amount of XP regardless of the approach used. Then that guarantees that people will be creative or at least advance at the same rate regardless of how they go about doing things, even if there's no treasure in the end.

You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world." 

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world." 

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world." 

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

It's also wrongheaded in multiple ways. Because not only does it ignore that verisimilitude is a thing, which is one of those pitfalls in discussions of RPGs or fiction that won't die. But it even ignores whatever we're actually discussing at any given moment in lieu of making pontifications that don't contribute anything.

We're not even discussing fact vs. fiction, but rather what works/makes sense or doesn't work/make sense in game mechanics. But we can't point out that something doesn't really work a certain way in reality when someone else implies that it does without someone else stepping in and pointing out: "What are you guys talking about? This is elf gaems. LULZ!"

Well I guess that we have to keep the crap game mechanics (assuming that I'm correct in my prior post) and not discuss ways to improve them because "elf gaems".

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world." 

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

I agree that the way the sentiment is most often brought up, it really is a total garbage throw-away line, generally intended to end conversation, and people who utter those words ought to be ashamed.

But the sentiment exists because there is a sense in which it is true. It's just that I rarely see the proper nuance applied.

Sometimes you get these "realistic" combat systems in RPGs that get elaborate with all these hit locations, crits that sever the left ring finger and such. The problem is, to get that level of "realism" in combat, you have to assume a real adversary. And in practice it means the combat is assumed to be between two humans. Even though wolves, snakes, alligators, and hippos are all real things, it's just usually these game designers weren't even thinking that far ahead. But obviously the hit locations are going to be very different for those creatures, and so usually whatever "realistic" rules there were for fighting humans go out the window at that point.

Then start piling on fantasy creatures, dragons, carrion crawlers, displacer beasts, amorphous blobs, aggressive plants, undead, and at some point we do have to face facts that this sort of realism clashes with fantasy and that the notion of just grafting fantasy onto a realistic basis is a pretty naïve sentiment. At the very least, it takes some reconciliation that isn't obvious. And I can give some examples of a reconciliation.

In Star Wars, the movies, not the RPGs, sometimes you're blasting at completely alien creatures. Or AT-ST's, or star ships. So if you're trying to model this in an RPG, you need a pretty generalized combat system. But then when it comes to the lightsaber duals, you've got hands being lopped off left and right. For that, a hit location system would be appropriate. And so you could just have a combat sub system specialized for lightsaber fights. And that would be totally on-brand and strike the right feel.

In RPGs, one of the places you see something this is in the 1E weapon vs armor adjustment tables. They only apply to man vs man combat, giving more detail there. Man vs monster just uses the generalized attack matrix raw. Same is true of initiative as well--all the "complexities" involving weapon speed and such are really only applicable in man vs man combat. So what you have is a simple generalized system that's not very realistic but is really the best you can do given the broad array of adversaries included in the game. But then you also have more detailed sub-systems for adding realism when confronting more realistic adversaries.

Dangerous Journeys reconciles it in a different direction. It has a hit location that is intended to be applied across the board. But it just uses abstract hit locations, non-vital, vital, super-vital, and ultra-vital. So if you're trying to emulate Alien Nation, you don't have to re-write the hit location system to reflect the fact that the aliens' gonads are under their arms. Super-vital is super-vital. You would just describe it as a karate chop to the arm pit rather than a knee to the groin.

Quote from: Zelen on June 16, 2023, 10:45:11 PM

Quote from: Itachi on June 16, 2023, 07:23:05 PM
The OP seems to come from a pretty narrow premise of wargames/skirmish-derived combat. One where the rules only give weight to direct physical attacks and everything else is either undervaluated or reliant on GM fiat (or both), which is true for games like D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc.

But there are LOTS of games that don't follow that mold, and actually favor non-direct physical attacks, or at least make them on par with other kinds of interactions. Like those that turn atributes into "mental hit points", or use abstract damage currencies like "stress", and allow verbal or psychological interactions to be as effective as physical ones (like Cortex, FATE, Mutant Y0, etc). Also, games that have clear cut/non-fiat based social rules like Exalted, Blades in the Dark and PbtA, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc.

It's really not about "combat" per se at all, but rather underlying principle of mathematics and game design. If your game system has a depleting resource which is a win condition then directly depleting that resource is usually going to be optimal. You have to actually do design work to make that not the optimal choice.

Yes, but that only makes sense in "closed box" systems, which make combat into this isolated, skirmish-like minigame, that don't interface well with other rules in the book. For these types of games, sure, it makes sense. But TTRPGs have so wide a design space at this point that the OP premise feels too narrow. There are bazillion games that break that mold and make it possible to deplete that resource in different ways, or have multiple different resources to be depleted. Some of those games were already cited above.

So, the OP premise sounds like: "Hey, in a game of Boxing there is nothing more optimal than a punch!". Well, that's obvious. But TTRPG at this point is like MMA, with a multitude of games that allow kicks, takedowns, choke holds, you name it.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world." 

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

I'd say it that there needs to be "good enough" realism.  In practical terms, that will mean that a lot of things will be as you say, and quite a few others will edge slightly away from the it just to make the game run well or smooth out the discrepancies.  That is, if I've got flying, fire-breathing dragons, I typically want some lesser creatures that also couldn't exist in the real world,  but are closer to real-world creatures than dragons are. 

I think most of that argument isn't based on reason, though, but power plays.  It goes like this, with the instigator trying to avoid the conclusion:

Instigator:  I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights.
GM:  Doesn't fit my world.
Instigator:  You've got dragons that violate the laws of physics, this is no different.
GM:  In your world maybe  not, in my world it is.
Instigator:  You are stuck on realism.
GM:  No, I'm stuck on running a world that is realistic enough for me to enjoy running, that that doesn't stick my suspension of disbelief into a sack and use it as a pinata. 
Instigator:  But I really want to do this!
GM:  Knock yourself out.  You can make your own world whatever makes sense to you.

Greetings!

Quotation of Steven Mitchell:
"I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights."

*Laughing*--PRICELESS!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Admittedly, my naked halfling barbarian, Starkers the Enormous, wouldn't work as well in GURPS or Rolemaster as he does in D&D 5e.

Quote from: Lunamancer on June 17, 2023, 11:02:03 AM
Dangerous Journeys reconciles it in a different direction. It has a hit location that is intended to be applied across the board. But it just uses abstract hit locations, non-vital, vital, super-vital, and ultra-vital. So if you're trying to emulate Alien Nation, you don't have to re-write the hit location system to reflect the fact that the aliens' gonads are under their arms. Super-vital is super-vital. You would just describe it as a karate chop to the arm pit rather than a knee to the groin.

Dammit!  Once again EGG shows that he really understood the nature of RPGs and what they were attempting to do.  This is an approach worth considering...