Any system is going to have points of inelegances no matter how "smooth" it is. It's the nature of RNGs in general. No matter what systems you use, the random number generator has breakpoints and endpoints. That's just mathematical reality.

Dice pool systems can confidently state with some accuracy that there is no upper limit to the number of dice you can roll and thus no upper end point at which the game has to stop making sense. Assuming you have your scaling functions set up properly there is no reason that you couldn't have hundred die attack pools wielded by demigods bashing on hundred die defense pools preserving the lives of ancient behemoths. But there is a hard limit of zero dice, meaning that the game will always be inelegant and strange when dice pools get very small. Furthermore, even if you slay the compelling yet mathematically unacceptable beast of variable target numbers, the reality is that permutation notation is difficult for most people to do in their heads, meaning that while computing averages in a dicepool system is easy, computing chances is beyond the abilities of most players and Mister Caverns.

Curved die rolls such as 3d6 or 2d10 have the mathematically lovely property where you can set a bonus to shift your chances of success by a specific number of standard deviations or fractional standard deviations. And that makes statisticians very happy. But they don't have any properties that would allow you to set any bonus that would give any specific chances to succeed. Every bonus adds a different literal amount of success chance, which is itself going to b different depending on what your other bonuses and penalties actually were. Further, calculation of odds is again based on permutation notation, which most people cannot do. And on top of that, the statistical jumps in the middle of the RNG range are very coarse, relatively speaking.

Uncurved die rolls, such as d20 or d100 are simple to calculate and explain - since every point on the die is precisely the same percentage shift as the one before it. But while the statistics are easy to calculate (+1 on a d100 is a 1% shift in odds of success, for example), they are also necessarily shallow. A bonus that pushes someone from even odds to +1 Standard Deviation is sufficiently large on an uncurved die roll that it can't be added twice without pushing you all the way off the RNG. This makes standard modifier tables very clunky, because adding a couple of modifiers together will break your random number generator every time. Furthermore, uncurved die rolls can't generate "Rare" results without being very very large. Even percentile dice can only generate a 1% likely result, which is not unlikely enough to reasonably generate anything that is actually unlikely in any realistic fashion (for example: in the real world, a side effect of a medication that affects one person in ten is considered "common").

So no, a "perfect" system does not exist. It's actually provable that it can't exist. But you could have a game that is "good enough" out of the core book(s). That's extremely conceivable.

-Frank

I'm glad there's no perfect "clean" system.  I like a little wonkyness thrown in.

Quote from: Seanchai;413973More difficult to defend when you look at it as a whole, isn't it?

Seanchai

No, it isn't.

You were being a douchebag and Pundit gave you an up close and personal example of why you were in the wrong about comparing him to the modclique. You've been crying about the spanking you got ever since.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;414000I'm glad there's no perfect "clean" system.  I like a little wonkyness thrown in.

Clean systems end up so clean they are sterile.

Quote from: Seanchai;413973And the other folks he said he'd ban? If you recall, once he'd decided he was going to start banning the folks who were irritating him, that's when I compared him to the Big Purple mods. I didn't kick off the mess.

In other words, the guy who says we have free speech, that he's an exemplary mod, etc., said, basically, "I'm tired of being criticized. If you keep doing it, I'm going to ban you."

More difficult to defend when you look at it as a whole, isn't it?

Seanchai

"What a couple of dicks."

Quote from: Benoist;414004Clean systems end up so clean they are sterile.

Exactly.  I don't expect games to be Spawn of Fashan or World of Synnibar or anything, but at the same time there comes a point where by constantly introducing "bug fixes" you have drained all the color and potential quirky fun out of a game.

Quote from: RPGPundit;413581Ok, you're done here.

RPGPundit

Thank fuck for that.  His bizarre attempts to bully Koltar were repulsive.  I like we can say what he want here, but that was basically stalking.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;414012Exactly.  I don't expect games to be Spawn of Fashan or World of Synnibar or anything, but at the same time there comes a point where by constantly introducing "bug fixes" you have drained all the color and potential quirky fun out of a game.

Agreed. It's like eliminating every single outlet where a GM could plug his own imagination to come up with his own stuff to end up with just one with the label "Get on with the program, or play another game."

Cleanliness doesn't mean that you can't do stuff, it means that doing stuff is smoothly integrated into the system as a whole. Whether a game is rules light or rules heavy, there is no reason that performing an action would have to be clunky to be possible.

While perfect cleanliness is not possible, because no possible random number generator has every property you could want it to have and using multiple different kinds of random number generators is itself inelegant in the extreme, that doesn't mean that cleaning a system up has to make it any more sterile. For example, if you were running a percentile system, it is traditional to make it a "roll under" system because that way your number is equal to the percent chance of success. But that makes getting margins of success more painful than they need to be and also makes modifiers clumsy (since you usually end up subtracting a positive modifier from the roll, thereby losing the skill/percentage identity anyway). But if you just added your character's number to the die roll and set the target number to 100, it would all be much cleaner. Addition is faster than subtraction, and in any case your "margin of success" would always just be the last two digits of your roll, so you wouldn't even need to define it in terms of success margins (you could just use final values, because they'd be the same). Very importantly, cleaning a system up in that fashion would in no way make the game any more sterile or less flexible - it would simply speed up the calculations of action resolution, which is all good.

There are a number of things to complain about with regards to 3rd edition D&D. But the shift from THAC0 to a simpler "Roll High" system is simply not one of them. That aspect of the game made things cleaner and more explicable and in no way had a negative impact on the game's versatility. Bottom line: more cleanliness is to be desired, but the reality is that your random number generator and ability system are still going to have break points and end points no matter what you do. And if someone analyses your game long enough, they will be able to find hilarious breakdowns in verisimilitude in some edge case somewhere and if your game is otherwise popular enough, they will submit it to the next edition of Murphy's Laws.

-Frank

Quote from: Seanchai;413973And the other folks he said he'd ban? If you recall, once he'd decided he was going to start banning the folks who were irritating him, that's when I compared him to the Big Purple mods. I didn't kick off the mess.

In other words, the guy who says we have free speech, that he's an exemplary mod, etc., said, basically, "I'm tired of being criticized. If you keep doing it, I'm going to ban you."

More difficult to defend when you look at it as a whole, isn't it?

Seanchai

Not at all. You're just pissy because you can't just throw shit at the forum owner as long or as hard as you want and get away with it. Still doesn't bring this place anywhere in the same hemisphere as RPG.net. Wanna prove to us that RPG.net isn't far more rigid in it's mod policies, go post on the forum the same kind of stuff you post here and we'll see. You can come back here with links and prove us all wrong.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;414020they will submit it to the next edition of Murphy's Laws.

-Frank

Murphy's Rules.

I called Pundit an Arrogant Asshole and told him he only did reviews for the free swag (for which I apologized) and he didn't ban me.

I like that we can express our opinions, even having a rotten week that makes us a little more cranky than usual, uttering things that we regret later on, and not get ourselves banned for it.

I guarantee that if I called anyone on the RPGnet mod team an Arrogant Asshole, that I would get at least a week or more off, if not a permaban depending on the context and number of offenses built up.

Virtual stalking is a whole different case, and I agree with Pundit's interpretation of what was happening to Koltar.

Quote from: PaladinCA;414028I called Pundit an Arrogant Asshole and told him he only did reviews for the free swag (for which I apologized) and he didn't ban me.

I like that we can express our opinions, even having a rotten week that makes us a little more cranky than usual, uttering things that we regret later on, and not get ourselves banned for it.

I guarantee that if I called anyone on the RPGnet mod team an Arrogant Asshole, that I would get at least a week or more off, if not a permaban depending on the context and number of offenses built up.

Virtual stalking is a whole different case, and I agree with Pundit's interpretation of what was happening to Koltar.

I told Pundy to fuck his mother and didn't get banned for it.

Oh, wait, no I didn't.

Pundy, go fuck your mother.

If I get banned now this post will be a most ironic final one.

Quote from: Sigmund;414022Not at all. You're just pissy because you can't just throw shit at the forum owner as long or as hard as you want and get away with it. Still doesn't bring this place anywhere in the same hemisphere as RPG.net. Wanna prove to us that RPG.net isn't far more rigid in it's mod policies, go post on the forum the same kind of stuff you post here and we'll see. You can come back here with links and prove us all wrong.

Erm, Seanchai was banned from there about 6 years ago.

Quote from: One Horse Town;414035Erm, Seanchai was banned from there about 6 years ago.

Irony.