To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers
That's what any reasonable player does.
Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.
_J_, you know how we all make fun of you for being a robot without any ability to comprehend humanity? This is why.
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
So my wife just had to mercy-kill one of the cardinals in our yard (which she likes) because one of our neighbor's cats (which she hates) had snapped its neck but not killed it yet and was playing with it. Not really looking forward to going home and dealing with that.
Yeah that's not going to be a great situation.
There was a juvenile fox in our yard last year and I thought my wife would think it was cool so I took a few pictures.
To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers
That's what any reasonable player does.
Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.
Frankly, it discourages people from playing the game. The Hide the Ball game is only fun for the person hiding the ball.
I missed all this conversation so if it's been brought up slap me.
The Hobbit is going to be shown at 48fps in Theaters that can support it. Supposed to be cool/weird as fuck
I wonder if this will have the same effect that HDTV had when we all first saw it.
We grow so accustomed to a certain artificial representation of reality, then we see something marginally more realistic and the effect becomes mind-blowing.
most people with taste turn off their 120 hz mode of their HDTVs tho
yeah it looks like a soap opera set, or an odd play
When I look at the game engines available to license, it seems like there's shit-tons of games in progress.
But then I remember that few of these will ever see the light of day, and the number drops to like 3-4 dozen. That's pretty good odds on a PC game, assuming you can actually ship something quality.
its also about what your relationship to the rules system is
you are playing a role
you should be making choices primarily based on the semantic content of the trait, not its underlying mechanism - if the mechanism is overlying the semantics, then you are playing the mechanism not roleplaying the experience
this is a sliding scale thing, but in general if your players are always peeking under the hood to build themselves then it means your players cannot take your descriptions at their face value or understand them intuitively
Right, exactly. A feat called "Toughness" that describes how it makes you tougher than normal people, should make your character tough in a way that is clearly visible while playing the game and actually makes you measurably tougher in the rules.
When it doesn't really do that beyond giving you a paltry, piss-ant one shot of HP that is laughably meaningless past level 2, then that's the game being somewhat dishonest with how it's presenting itself to you.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers
That's what any reasonable player does.
No they don't. It's what hardcore players do. This is a game marketed toward ages ten and up, J. Letting people not have fun because "ha ha you should have studied statistics" is objectively poor game design.
I'll admit that I haven't read kite runner or a thousand splendid suns. I recognize this is actually a flaw in my character, but I mean I'm so far down this road I might as well just market it as a facet of my being
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
computer rpg design had to overcome all those design problems as they developed, and its interesting nobody thinks the way he does any more
Plenty of people do in the tabletop sphere, out of a misguided belief that mechanical rigor somehow saps a game of some unquantifiable essence.
These are the sorts of people who think there's actual real marked differences between "rollplayers" and "roleplayers"
or talk about "Narrativist" vs. "Gameist" design as if that's a real thing
aka people who want another way to scoff "Pfft, casuals"
What is that game theory called, that breaks players down into Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, Killer?
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited April 2012
its one of those things i realised after far too long playing computer rpgs as number simulators
theyre much more fun if you just turn part of your brain off and buy into the fiction presented to you
the same is infinitely true of tabletop rpgs, but its easier not to get invested and just minmax a character because it requires nothing more than a set of skills that anybody familiar with computer games finds trivial
its the empathy, emotional investment, acting, etc that most "nerds" struggle with
its one of those things i realised after far too long playing computer rpgs as number simulators
theyre much more fun if you just turn part of your brain off and buy into the fiction presented to you
the same is infinitely true of tabletop rpgs, but its easier not to get invested and just minmax a character because it requires nothing more than a set of skills that anybody familiar with computer games finds trivial
its the empathy, emotional investment, acting, etc that most "nerds" struggle with
To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers
That's what any reasonable player does.
Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.
A lot of people dont play games to do math and take the rules at face value so they can continue on to doing what they want to do which is make a cool character and role play.
I can understand why a person would be initially inclined towards this sentiment.
But given the quantity of numbers involved in the game, it seems silly to ignore the mathematical component of character design. You’re rolling dice to generate numbers, you’re defining characters in terms of their numbers, you’re weighing your numbers against charts of other numbers.
How someone can be aware of that, and yet ignore it to focus upon “Herp derp imma rogue” eludes me.
The issue, J, is in the importance of role-playing in the equation: why, in the interest of role-playing, would one have to take one perk over another due to mathematical superiority if it conflicts with their character? I struggled with this issue as well but after some thought realized the prime directive of RPGs - to enjoy a role outside the boundaries of our strict reality, that is, our operating reality that has asymmetric and measurably 'correct' outcomes.
Yeah…
One time my friends got mad at me for mathing, and so forced me to pick a character that I had to role play. I could only discern the role playing aspects, and couldn’t focus upon the math / stats.
the classic example, and one he admitted to, is the Toughness feat in D&D 3rd edition. The description says that this will make your guy harder to kill in combat. What it actually does is give you a trivial number of extra hit points (like, 5 extra hp every three or four levels, when you gain as many as 1-10 per level normally) that are vastly outclassed by other options - for instance, if you want to not die, you're always mathematically better off taking one of the options that raises your defense so you don't get hit in the first place.
But those options don't really come out and say what they do - they might be given innocuous names like "advanced shield proficiency" or something. To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers, and people who do that will have results that are mechanically better than people who don't. The guy who picks "toughness" is going to sit around getting hit a lot and dying and wondering why his little man isn't actually that tough. Which, since the game is ostensibly about playing a role rather than winning at math, seems unsportsmanlike.
the original version of Toughness in 3e was even worse than Jacob has stated, since it was literally just a flat, tiny HP bump when you first took the feat and then never any more later. They tried to fix that in 3.5, but yes Toughness is a perfect example of a "mastery trap".
Hilariously enough, 3.5 introduced quite a few of its own version of reverse Mastery Traps, which felt like they were designed to entice math nerds with spreadsheets who never get to fucking play the game with real people at an actual table.
"If I take this feat from this book, and this prestige class, combined with this item, if an enemy uses this spell on me I will have unlimited hit points"
Like, they'd be mathematically correct but no DM in his right mind would allow those sort of contrivances in a character in the first place and even if he did, the circumstances they'd need to excel at their mathematical excellence would be meaningless.
I remember reading a post on the WotC forums where a guy was SUPER pissed because he showed up to play a game with some dudes from college and he had this really amazing, optimized combat build... only to discover these guys enjoyed the dramatic aspects of D&D more and if any dice were rolled at all in most game sessions, it was for things like Diplomacy checks.
whooooooooops
The mental image of a lone wolf navy SEAL showing up at some upper crusty dinner party in the hamptons, rolling terribly and using the wrong fork and thus screwing the party
So were "fighters" in a fantasy role playing setting too reminiscent of the bullies who savaged his taint with his own underwear as a kid? Is he trying to make some sort of haughty political statement about intellectualism by elevating one group of classes and nerfing another?
This Monte Cook guy is a riddle wrapped in a cheese-stained, midwestern puzzle.
I need to temp ban myself from Comixology's site. Every time I go there is a comic (or twelve) that I want and they are just a dollar or two (or $3.99)...
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Donkey KongPutting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered Userregular
The problem with playing games straight, answering questions based on emotional response, etc is that games also fucking suck at emotional investment.
I tried to play LA Noire like I was roleplaying a real detective and it was a disaster. If felt like a conversation with crazy people over which I had no real control.
Thousands of hot, local singles are waiting to play at bubbulon.com.
computer rpg design had to overcome all those design problems as they developed, and its interesting nobody thinks the way he does any more
Plenty of people do in the tabletop sphere, out of a misguided belief that mechanical rigor somehow saps a game of some unquantifiable essence.
These are the sorts of people who think there's actual real marked differences between "rollplayers" and "roleplayers"
or talk about "Narrativist" vs. "Gameist" design as if that's a real thing
aka people who want another way to scoff "Pfft, casuals"
well, it's funny, you get it from both ends. there are the amateur thespian types who drag out the fainting couch at the suggestion that a system should be kind of mathematically robust, like all those awful numbers will sap the color and joy out of the world. but there are also the oldschool grognards who stick Gygax quotes in their sigs and they think game balance and math rigor is stupid because to them it's an adversarial, players-vs-GM game and giving the players a suite of effective options impinges on the GM's prerogative to go "no, you can't do that. also you die. roll up a new guy."
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Donkey KongPutting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered Userregular
Would someone please go synchronize the clocks on nodes of Vanilla's cluster? This is ridiculous.
Thousands of hot, local singles are waiting to play at bubbulon.com.
You know what would be the Holy Grail of videogaming? Creating AI that doesn't chase you around. You're fighting Bossy McBosserson, he's too tough to fight toe-to-toe, so what do you do? You run next to the perimeter of the arena or whatever taking potshots at him while he runs after you, always two steps behind. One way to hide this is do what they do in all the Metal Gear Solid games: make the boss move faster than the player. But if devs can figure out how to make a boss corner a player inside an arena? That would be something magical.
Posts
_J_, you know how we all make fun of you for being a robot without any ability to comprehend humanity? This is why.
:shock:
Great song.
Yeah that's not going to be a great situation.
There was a juvenile fox in our yard last year and I thought my wife would think it was cool so I took a few pictures.
She cried because "its so skinny!"
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Also, check out his latest project in CF, pretty sure it's way less mafia and way more what you are looking at.
twitch.tv/tehsloth
Frankly, it discourages people from playing the game. The Hide the Ball game is only fun for the person hiding the ball.
yeah it looks like a soap opera set, or an odd play
But then I remember that few of these will ever see the light of day, and the number drops to like 3-4 dozen. That's pretty good odds on a PC game, assuming you can actually ship something quality.
Right, exactly. A feat called "Toughness" that describes how it makes you tougher than normal people, should make your character tough in a way that is clearly visible while playing the game and actually makes you measurably tougher in the rules.
When it doesn't really do that beyond giving you a paltry, piss-ant one shot of HP that is laughably meaningless past level 2, then that's the game being somewhat dishonest with how it's presenting itself to you.
Plenty of people do in the tabletop sphere, out of a misguided belief that mechanical rigor somehow saps a game of some unquantifiable essence.
No they don't. It's what hardcore players do. This is a game marketed toward ages ten and up, J. Letting people not have fun because "ha ha you should have studied statistics" is objectively poor game design.
I will indeed!
P.S. infidel is super nice
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
These are the sorts of people who think there's actual real marked differences between "rollplayers" and "roleplayers"
or talk about "Narrativist" vs. "Gameist" design as if that's a real thing
aka people who want another way to scoff "Pfft, casuals"
What is that game theory called, that breaks players down into Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, Killer?
theyre much more fun if you just turn part of your brain off and buy into the fiction presented to you
the same is infinitely true of tabletop rpgs, but its easier not to get invested and just minmax a character because it requires nothing more than a set of skills that anybody familiar with computer games finds trivial
its the empathy, emotional investment, acting, etc that most "nerds" struggle with
bingo
I can understand why a person would be initially inclined towards this sentiment.
But given the quantity of numbers involved in the game, it seems silly to ignore the mathematical component of character design. You’re rolling dice to generate numbers, you’re defining characters in terms of their numbers, you’re weighing your numbers against charts of other numbers.
How someone can be aware of that, and yet ignore it to focus upon “Herp derp imma rogue” eludes me.
Yeah…
One time my friends got mad at me for mathing, and so forced me to pick a character that I had to role play. I could only discern the role playing aspects, and couldn’t focus upon the math / stats.
So I played a Kender.
They learned their lesson.
The mental image of a lone wolf navy SEAL showing up at some upper crusty dinner party in the hamptons, rolling terribly and using the wrong fork and thus screwing the party
I love this mental image
The RPG guy tears are just icing on the cake
This Monte Cook guy is a riddle wrapped in a cheese-stained, midwestern puzzle.
I tried to play LA Noire like I was roleplaying a real detective and it was a disaster. If felt like a conversation with crazy people over which I had no real control.
hey remember the dead island trailer
Now I have to figure out how to eat this sloppy joe without making a mess of myself.
twitch.tv/tehsloth
I tried that with the Leisure Suit Larry kickstarter to much the same effect.
Richard Bartle did that
It's less of a theory and more of a generalized observation and it only actually applies to players of his MUD (back when it existed)
"OK, I'm rolling a kender"
I WANT TO MURDER EVERY PERSON WHO FUNDED THAT PROJECT.
It certainly seems to map well onto the wider gaming community, esp. when you recognize that people have a bit of all four in their makeup.
DK please explain why a Leisure Suit Larry project with updated graphics and gameplay would be a bad thing!
build martyr. :P
Because the Leisure Suit Larry games rank amongst mankind's most awful crimes.
After a couple hours I fell in love with them and suddenly started being very careful about the math in each situation.
well, it's funny, you get it from both ends. there are the amateur thespian types who drag out the fainting couch at the suggestion that a system should be kind of mathematically robust, like all those awful numbers will sap the color and joy out of the world. but there are also the oldschool grognards who stick Gygax quotes in their sigs and they think game balance and math rigor is stupid because to them it's an adversarial, players-vs-GM game and giving the players a suite of effective options impinges on the GM's prerogative to go "no, you can't do that. also you die. roll up a new guy."
utensil that shit
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Whyre you hating on LSL2K12, dawg?
Shut yo mouth! Dead Island was passably fun!