Help me actually understand Winds of Fate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

EDIT: Forgot to respond to LR. I think I see what you mean: WoF could be seen as a valid abstraction of the ways the fictional world constrains the characters the way our own universe constrains us. Also, I believe Frank already mentioned people had less trouble dealing with WoF as a deck of cards than as a die roll, suggesting that obfuscating WoF would indeed make it more acceptable.

RE: The loss of player agency.

Okay, imagine if a game did 'Winds of Facing' where it was determined that the direction you were facing was decided by a d8 roll and was weighed in such a way so that the direction an enemy in was more likely to be where you were facing. You even got a mechanic that could occasionally 'force' the direction that you were facing in now and then.

It's not very hard to see people fume and fuss about a loss of player agency--people would say that a 5% chance to have your back facing the dragon for whatever reason was total bullshit and it was taking control out of the hands of the player.

Now imagine a game which didn't have facing rules at all. The assumed status quo was that players were facing a variety of situations but was abstracted; this means that sometimes a character had their back turned to a dragon when they were the only ones in the room, but the players had no way of knowing it since the position was not communicated to the player. In order to make it such that the system wasn't inherently a time-saver, an extra roll got thrown in somewhere--perhaps during the attack resolution system, called a Dragon Die or something, where the defender rolled a d6. 5-6 added -2 to the enemy's attack roll and a 1-2 added a +2 to the enemy's attack roll. This effect was supposed to simulate facing but of course wasn't called that.

Which system do you think would go over with players? The second one, obviously, even though it represents a net loss of player agency. The second one you have absolutely no control over, but because it doesn't flat-out say that you had your back on the dragon it offends players' sensibilities less.

And that is exactly what pisses me off. It's not that people want to micromanage control over their characters, it's that people don't want to face possibilities that what they think is optimal for the situation doesn't occur. They never wanted actual control, they just didn't want to be disabused of the illusion of control. That's really, really lame. TGD had a good sneer at The Insane Clown Posse and their ilk for saying that knowing how rainbows and magnets shit work makes them sad but when the shoe's on the other foot we don't act any better.

One thing that was mentioned earlier was the idea of easy ways for the player to pare down the number of reasonable options. The idea of tags for powers has already been discussed, so why not use them to encode some tactical information? If I'm a Black Mage trying to protect a village from a Frost Giant raiding party, there's two man ways I can go about doing that: preventing them from reaching the village and killing them before they can do much damage. Right off the bat I know that I probably want to use a [Wall] or a [Fire] spell, which cuts down my options considerably. Tagging things obviously won't help characters with overly broad abilities like D&D wizards too much, but a character with a reasonably defined shtick shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out what to do.

rampaging-poet, I don't know if you've seen my other posts, but this grim scenario is actually what I want to avoid, since it leads to ability spam. When players discover that Wall of Fire is supereffective and the giants don't pull some magic rabbit out of their ass to counter it (OMG the frost Giants have Red Dragonscale Armor of Flight) it leads to players ignoring their other powers and smashing the 'Wall of Fire' button unless they're stopped in some way. Either by explicitly spamming it or trying to force the tactical situation to revolve around the ability i.e. Murder Pinball.

The obvious way to avert this is to make it a unique charge, but then after Wall of Fire is used the player goes back to staring at all of their other options and leaves you back at square one.

I can't believe I haven't already asked this but are WoF rolls made for the other side too? Does this mean that the MC is making extra rolls for each enemy or that one roll determines where on each enemy's matrix you are? Are enemies set to use the same WoF table as players and if so then wouldn't you be writing a mountain of abilities for the Monster Manual?

From my experience with running 4E encounters the vast majority of monsters needn't be on the WoF table. They can actually use a really stripped-down version of the Vancian system or even an At-Will system. It's acceptable for monsters to have 2-4 abilities that they endlessly spam because the DM controls a lot of them at once and doesn't have to worry about getting bored because they get access to a new cornucopia every new combat--even if the monster encounters are generated at random. If you get a boring or tactically inept set, you'll get another crack at it next encounter.

This is precisely why if I play a 4E D&D game it'll only be if I get to be a DM, because running monsters as MC is a lot more fun than running players.

[Username17]

Actually, I think that giving mook monsters a wheel with only one column in it is really a pretty decent way of resolving monster action choices fairly. The basilisk spits poison gas on a 5, so if you roll a 5 it spits poison gas. This way monsters don't end up spamming shit and when the monsters end up doing something that is super effective against the team's ninja, it isn't the MC fucking with that player. It's the result of a "fair" RNG.

Topdecking is bad for PCs because it makes it so that the player can leave the room and other people can flip over the top of the deck. But top decking for monsters is totally fine. In many ways preferable to the MC actually selecting actions for them on a turn by turn basis. Especially if the monsters have one or more abilities that are "unfair" (or good against, depending on your perspective) to one or more of the player characters.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

I'm going to put you on ignore for about a week. If in a week's time you're still accusing me of nonsensical shit and calling me a baby for not wanting to listen to your incoherent objections, I'll put you back on ignore permanently.

Oh god, NOOooOOOoooOOOoOOOOooooooooo. You are pathetic, Frank. Who the fuck else makes pronouncements like this?

Props for actually weighing in with a post with content though. I mean, it was all to address incoherent nonsense HAHA but I guess your grace is just fantastic.

I still have six days left! W00T1

When people say that WoF requires a lot of writing or could easily end up with unbalanced abilities, they are not arguing honestly. Those statements are simply true about all systems and have nothing to do with WoF at all.

Its still a valid criticism. In a game where you have access to an overpowered ability all the time, you nerf it. Or write better abilities. In WoF it becomes, "yes its overpowered but it only comes up X% of the time!" So, rather than write a meaningful ability you end up with a system that implicitly doesn't care that an ability is overpowered.

So is a WoF class okay that has shitty abilities and a few devastating ones? Is that good design? "C'mon, six! I need a six!" Or is that a trap option? If you do create a series of generally balanced powers, doesn't that obviate the need for WoF to address overpowered actions?

When people say that WoF sometimes doesn't let them use an ability that they want, they are not even being coherent. No system lets you use every ability all the time. At the very least, you aren't going to be allowed to use melee attacks on people far away, and all systems of making things more complex will also create situations in which on or more abilities is unusable.

This is utter bullshit. You can't use a melee attack on a non-adjacent opponent because... they're non-adjacent. Hopefully, someone decided they wanted to move out of melee range. In WoF, you can't attack because... the dice said so.

That abstraction is not equivalent to the real situation you're trying to represent, simply by virtue of it being an abstraction.

At the same time, its supposed to stop attack-spam, but if that's coming up in any changing tactical situation (rather than Wall of Fire bombing Ice Giants at range, which I'd consider simply good decision-making), then that indicates that the problem is with the too-good attack, not a shortcoming inherent in RPGs. WoF addresses that by going for a symptom (attack spam) rather than a cause (too-good attack). Outside a changing tactical situation I'd prefer that you can actually spam a useful ability: if your opponents are slow-moving or hampered such that one move does them in, then they're justly deserving of an ass-beating. If those Ice Giants keep running into your Walls and there's no way around them and they can't hit you with boulders, then you won. That's fine. You pulled it off. Victory! What's gained by eliminating that possibility that can't be done by expanding the scenario bounds? Why didn't the Ice Giants scatter? Why were you able to bind them up tactically such that they had no options but to die in fire? Why would you prefer a system where a player can't set that up?

Okay, imagine if a game did 'Winds of Facing'...

I imagine such a system would have a lot of similar complaints, Lago.

If a creature has a "look there HA I'M BEHIND YOU" as an ability, comparing levels or stats or whatever to determine efficacy is a reasonable abstraction. Rolling a die randomly or blaming a GM who doesn't explain the situation properly is not.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Maybe not every time, but close enough. And in a type of gaming as complex as people expect RPGs to be, that actually had better be the case and I for one would be deeply unimpressed if it wasn't, and worse if the system wasn't designed to support that instead of gimped so it can support uniform input monotony.

You vastly underestimate the difficulty it takes to avert this.

Okay, imagine if you will goblin archers in the forest. They are on the other side of a chasm spanned by a bridge or two. Fortunately for them the goblin archers were able to recruit some trolls or some shit to block the bridge, putting the players in a chokepoint. Sounds like a pretty robust tactical situation, right? Maybe not robust, but it definitely requires a level of thought more than 'random goblin archers in a flat plane! GO!' Well, you know what, there are several issues with this.

1. Goblin archers across a forest chasm isn't actually much different than drow archers on a cliff in a cave with grimlocks at the bottom or pirate cannoneers on a ship drifting away from the docks. As much as we hate to admit it, a lot of tactical setups are actually really reductionist; video games and tabletop games have figured this one out for years to the point of naming a lot of them. The obvious way to avert this would be to dump more shit onto the tactical field to spice it up--there's also a thunderstorm going on and a weird magical fog that causes random teleportitus and there's also a strange stone that creates an anti-goblin arrow force field on one corner of the battlefield where the players might turn the tables! So the goblin archers send one of the trolls to try to push it into the chasm. Which leads into the second problem.

2. Making a robust tactical situation is actually really, really difficult. If you have a game where combat is rare then it's definitely quite possible to create unique special snowflake battles that the players have never seen before, making the first complaint seem churlish. But in a game like D&D where stories of a group running three battles in a night are common, this is a near-impossibly tall order for the DM. A lot of DMs, including yours truly, will not actually create special snowflake battles for many of them and will end up resorting to 'eh, fuck it, goblin archers in the alleyways, some difficult terrain here and there from garbage and dead peasants, we're ready to rock' in order to meet time constraints or battle quotas. Which of course will lead to monotony after enough time.

The obvious way to avert this is to have a robust monster manual with lots of wild and wooly monsters in it that is easy to run. Goblin archers in the forest need not feel the same as umber hulks in the forest or even drow archers in the forest. This is actually probably the biggest goal of monster manuals, but as we've learned from 3E and 4E D&D there is a limit to the amount of complexity you can give the average monster before they become too complex to run.

Beyond that though course there's the problem that D&D has lasted for 30 years and on top of that expects people to fight 10+ battles in the average story arc. As amazing as it might sound, people are actually quite familiar with dragons, man-scorpions, frost giants, demons, and golems due to D&D's longevity and effect on related media like video games. You will reach a point and soon where ogre magi backed up by yakmen are old hat. Such is the success of D&D, but it's a pisser when you're trying to come up with monsters that people haven't already Seen A Million Times. So you can't solely rely on the Monster Manual to jazz things up. A game needs to hopefully find a third way of attacking combat monotony but the only really big thing you can change in the combat equation is player tactics. And that's where Winds of Fate come in.

And before you immediately tell me again 'that's why you need to throw out diverse sets of monsters at the players that need different tactics!', let me tell you why it's not a good idea to rely on this. Even though the expected goal of throwing out the occasional golem or fire elemental or puzzle monster or whatever is to break players out of the routine of 'I fireball it!', what actually ends up happening is something a lot different because this ignores the reason why players resort to ability spam/5Mod in the first place. Actually, I made this argument a couple of times earlier in the thread so I'll just post it again.

The thing that MfA and you are fantasizing about where people have 10 distinct powers that do different things and you reward people for picking the 'right' power never really works. Even in Mutants and Masterminds d20, which opens the floodgates to do anything you want with any power as long as you spent a Hero Point often has players spamming their same powers despite the game going out of its way to offer alternate situations in the solution books. Seriously, just read the goddamn logs for the Crucible City MUX and that stupid Heroes MUX pastiche that used that system. Players stuck to patterns and often didn't go for 'just as planned!' bait that seemed obvious to outsiders. Why is that?

1) It's often not as obvious as you think it would be for people to pick that 'just as planned' power. For example, should you hit the fire elemental with an Empowered Iceball, a Plane Shift, or a Wall of Stone? Depending on how you construct the game, they all might be equally useful even though a layperson would say 'go for the Iceball!'. Without such obvious decision points, the average person is going to default to what they feel most comfortable with, which invariably leads to ability spam. (Ed: This especially becomes a problem if you actually went ahead and made a small set of powers diverse, because it incentivizes people to stick to one power even more. There are a lot of occasions in which sunbeam won't do donkey dick and are forced to diversify, but it's very hard to come up with occasions that makes summon monster or mass curse more harmful than using another power). This is exactly what happened with Psions; they chose a small list of generically useful powers, some buffs and edge-case effects, then went to town. The only way you can avert this is by splitting up all versatile powers into individual spells, but then that either makes characters boring and one-note or it introduces option paralysis... which leads to people spamming the same one power anyway. Sigh.

2) Even if you do have a This Power Works Best situation, a lot of people aren't going to take it anyway. Either because of cautiousness, paranoia, laziness, roleplaying reasons, or they're just not that bright. They will of course stick to what they're comfortable with, which invariable leads to ability spam. Even though this seems like a minor thing, it's not. It's probably the biggest impediment on this list in fact. People are a combination of stubborn and looking for the path of perceived least resistance i.e. lazy. If you do a 'you can spam this power, but you'll get a -4 to attacks for it so it's a good idea to use something else', a large percentage of players will still choose to spam it. A lot of players' response to Salamanders Attack Your Fire Mage! is to sigh, suck up the fire resistance, and throw out fireballs anyway. You could theoretically put up enough obstacles to break up the player's pattern (these goblins have fire immunity and can fly over short walls!) but the problems with THAT approach is that A) this becomes very obvious after awhile and B) see caveat #2 about DMs being just about as lazy as players.

3) Those 'OMG that was just a PERFECT use of that power!' situations happen in comics and cartoons because, get this: the writers get a lot longer than 5 minutes to come up with something and even have considerable power to manipulate events into a 'just as planned' situation. The 'Iron Man modulates his laser to hit a ghost' tactic might seem obvious to you because you crafted the adventure, but it might not to the people actually playing it--at least not within a reasonable time frame. If someone is on a time crunch they will tend to default to what they feel most familiar with, which leads to ability spam.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I imagine such a system would have a lot of similar complaints, Lago.

If a creature has a "look there HA I'M BEHIND YOU" as an ability, comparing levels or stats or whatever to determine efficacy is a reasonable abstraction. Rolling a die randomly or blaming a GM who doesn't explain the situation properly is not.

Well, that's my frickin' point. Abstracted facing (like 3E and 4E D&D use) would have less player agency in it than Winds of Facing but would cause less flipping out. This leads me to suspect that it's not the loss of player agency that sticks in peoples' craws, but the fact that people don't like being aware of being stuck in suboptimal situations. Even though any good game requires suboptimal situations in order to function. Even though it's impossible for a game to have enough granularity in it for the outcome to be solely driven by good player decisions.

What people are upset about is not the loss of control, but the loss of illusion of control; if you take away that power but don't tell the players about it, players don't get upset. It's akin to someone not caring if a toy they never play with is missing but flipping out if they see someone playing with it three months later. Or chocolate samplers getting to taste every one of five samples being more satisfied with their experience than fellow samplers who were only allowed to try 10 out of 30 chocolates. You'd think that the latter group would be happier since they got to try twice as much chocolate and had a better selection palate, but no. Humans get more butthurt about the loss of illusion of power and fortune than the actual loss of power and fortune. Which is fucking bullshit.

[mean_liar]

I think that's a strawman positioning system. What game have you played where one character is able to declare their advantageous positioning against another with only an arbitrary (as opposed to contested) dieroll, absent any tactical maneuvering?

Not even old school DnD had that: there were all kinds of stipulations on setting up backstabs, sneaking, and detecting surprise attacks.

And considering that most of us prefer tactical combat with minis - some like abstract zones - it looks like you're creating an arbitrary positioning system to denigrate that doesn't exist and wouldn't be popular due to having a lot of similarly-considered negative bits about WoF.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Focus, mean_liar, we're not actually talking about facing, we're talking about player agency. It doesn't matter if my Winds of Facing system is oversimplified to the point of being a strawman, what matters is that you can actually extract some player agency out of it. Not as much as a freeform facing system that a lot of systems use, but there's still some. The important takeaway is that even if you have this tiny amount of player agency, people will still prefer facing systems with no player agency in it like 3E D&D's.

Freeform facing maintains the illusion by actually having the illusion of control conform to reality. Abstracted facing maintains the masquerade by just never bringing it up at all. Winds of Facing gives you more control than abstracted facing but doesn't allow you the illusion of control and that's the one that people bitterly complain about. With that in mind, doesn't it seem to you that what people are not actually complaining about is a loss of player agency, but the loss of illusion of player agency?

[mean_liar]

I haven't been following complaints of others too closely, considering I didn't jump in here until page 10. I saw the misunderstanding about flowcharting and felt embarrassed for the dude. wotmaniac still had some decent points, such as the possibility that WoF might have some hefty pain-in-the-ass areas in implementing level-ups (and what was unsaid, that such table optimizing would be vitally important, important enough that you're adding in another layer of complexity to character build strategizing). I felt like PhoneLobster's belief that the mass of discussion means the system is clearly bad is not an appropriate a priori conclusion, but I'm onboard with him when he says that the effort should be in making input/output decisions meaningful rather than abstracting them away.

I guess I still don't get it: when you say, "the important takeaway is that even if you have this tiny amount of player agency, people will still prefer facing systems with no player agency in it like 3E D&D's", all I can think about is that 3e DnD's facing system was a pretty reasonable one where your tactical maneuvering to prevent flanking was a big part of using terrain and 5' steps (ie., exercising player agency).

[PhoneLobster]

Goblin archers across a forest chasm isn't actually much different than drow archers on a cliff in a cave with grimlocks at the bottom or pirate cannoneers on a ship drifting away from the docks.

You are mincing with words and making some VERY subjective judgments there that a lot of us on this thread won't be agreeing with.

Those situations DO sound different and your RPG system SHOULD differentiate between them. If Drow, Goblins and Cannons shooting at you aren't different and if you shooting at them isn't different that sound like your system is INSANELY shallow and over simplified. If you can't differentiate between moving boats on water and an enclosed cave with MONSTERS IN THE BOTTOM and some foresty hole in the ground... what sort of bullshit system are you running?

Oh yeah, WoF, where drow, cannons, and goblins archers are all the same and we rely on a 1d6 auto tactical choice to provide the variation instead. That's just fricking insane. Why would you even WANT that let alone believe that it would work?

If you have a game where combat is rare then it's definitely quite possible to create unique special snowflake battles

Say hi to math for me. Every potential enemy, every potential obstacle or map feature, any newly gained character abilities, any situational or CHOICE based resource limitation, THESE feed into your system creating a vast array of possibilities. And each new element is MULTIPLICATIVE in the number of potential scenarios you can then create.

I rattled off a bunch of goblins in forest scenarios very easily, enough to do a fairly solid little night of adventuring right there. And there are many established RPG systems that would handle those variations and that night of gaming in a reasonable manner. There IS NOT a WoF system that does that, and WoF theoretically won't play nicely with creating new and different interesting decisions with those scenarios, because in WoF your WoF roll is actually ALWAYS going to be a bigger factor than the actual scenario you find yourself in.

In WoF fighting Drow and Goblin archers and Cannon dudes IS very similar, more so than in any standard RPG system and that's wrong, you've just taken a step BACKWARDS.

Actually, I made this argument a couple of times earlier in the thread so I'll just post it again.

WHAT? That... mess... of an argument? That? You... think that addresses anything?

You basically rambled on with a story that sums up to this.

"Even if you give players lots of good options they might pick something stupid"

That's not an argument in favor of WoF. That holds for WoF as much if not more than anything (what with the horrendous frustration and complexity issues WoF brings up for decision making).

More to the point it certainly ISN'T an argument against non-randomized tactical decision making.

The whole POINT of non-randomized tactical decision making is you can either pick the best ability, the ability you like from the best choice of abilities, or even, potentially, a sub standard ability.

We can protect dumb players a bit, we can have clearly stated abilities that make it fairly obvious when they are contenders for best choice, or worst choice. But protecting LAZY players, what the fuck crack are you on? Is that your job as game designer now? Punishing engaged and interested players with your mechanics so you can instead appeal to the guy at the table who doesn't give a fuck? How do you think THAT little marketing strategy will work out for you, go try it out, get back to me, I can make my own guesses as to how much "doesn't give a fuck" man is going to even notice your efforts while all the other players STRANGLE YOU.

Non-optimal choices exist in both WoF and non-WoF systems, and... so what? What the fuck was your point in that direction less ramble Lago. Because I saw a lot of words and no fucking content. It was pure mis directional waffle and I don't see why you think you should have said it once, much less repeated it when it clearly didn't work the first time.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Facing is a subset of tactical positioning, not the whole system. In 3E D&D it doesn't matter which direction your token or miniature is facing, no game effect gives a shit whether your miniature was pointed in the right direction. It's not to say that your character in that game is actually not facing a direction; if it was actually possible to reconstruct a 3E battle to another media you would see that the characters would still be doing things like facing the enemy and getting punished for not guarding their back. But unlike when the players moved 6 squares to the other side of the room or shot off a fireball which the simulation faithfully recreated, at no point was the direction a character faced decided by the player; meaning that it's totally fair game for the simuation or recreation to assume that the character wasn't guarding their back when Kobold #2 stuck a knife in it even though both Kobold miniatures were relative north of the player.

But it's still very easy to construct a system in which player facing does affect gameplay in some manner; 2E D&D AFAIK actually used player facing to some degree and as far as I know you could pretty much orient your facing wherever and practically whenever you wanted. By contrast, if you transferred that game to some other form of media or adaptation or simulation or whatever you could also see the decision points in which a player decided 'hey, I want to face NW relative to the two Kobolds instead of North even though it'll give Kobold #2 a clear shot at my back'. This system has more player agency in it than the first system.

But a third system that used Winds of Facing that let you control the direction every now and then would mostly resemble the first one, with a couple of decision points now and then where someone could go 'okay, on round three the player activated an Action Point and faced THIS way instead of what the dice said'. There's more agency in this system than the first one but less than the third.

The data point is that even if you control for resolution time the third system would easily be the least popular of the three ways to do facing. If it really was all about player agency then the second system would be the most favored, followed by the second, followed by the first. So is complaining about WoF really about the loss of player agency, or is it something else?

[mean_liar]

That second system is how Rolemaster does it. My takehome from that is that there's a point at which player agency and abstraction and complexity are a bearable cocktail, and a point at which agency is heightened to the point where its attendant complexity isn't worth it.

For its detractors, the loss perceived in WoF is too great, whereas at higher complexities losing that agency isn't considered a net loss.

I mean, no one really mourned the loss of Rolemaster's 100% activity per round split between subactions. At least, I didn't, in light of HERO and DnD's action classes. It was a loss of granularity and agency, but the complexity it did away with was welcome and worth it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Those situations DO sound different and your RPG system SHOULD differentiate between them. If Drow, Goblins and Cannons shooting at you aren't different and if you shooting at them isn't different that sound like your system is INSANELY shallow and over simplified. If you can't differentiate between moving boats on water and an enclosed cave with MONSTERS IN THE BOTTOM and some foresty hole in the ground... what sort of bullshit system are you running?

Yes, they sound different but if you deconstruct the situations enough they demand pretty much the same general tactics. Maybe not the exact same tactics (trolls have different weaknesses from grimlocks, you also have to worry about destroying the forest bridge), but there really isn't enough inherent differentiation to stop them from feeling like old hat after awhile on a gameplay level. Unless you REALLY pull out all of the stops, doing things like adding fog or a forest fire or a time limit isn't going to jazz things enough to break the monotony after the 5th or so time this situation pops up.

Say hi to math for me. Every potential enemy, every potential obstacle or map feature, any newly gained character abilities, any situational or CHOICE based resource limitation, THESE feed into your system creating a vast array of possibilities. And each new element is MULTIPLICATIVE in the number of potential scenarios you can then create.

You'd think so, but then how come 4E feels so boring even after three monster manuals and all of those abilities and two DMGs and redesigning the trap system so that it works alongside monsters in combat?

Obviously just adding more variables isn't going to produce diversity in of itself. You do need to spice the variables up, but the inherent limitations of TTRPG combat make it reductionist on some level and you need to be aware that adding Pokemon #500 with neverbefore seen moves isn't going to be suddenly exciting. For one people probably exhausted the well of creativity on Pokemon #259, for two people actually familiar with Pokemon are acquainted enough with its mechanics that the monotony of the battle resolution system is going to overwhelm their excitement at Pokemon #500 even if you have the next Pikachu on your hands.

"Even if you give players lots of good options they might pick something stupid"

If you refuse to understand why people will pick something stupid or suboptimal then you're never going to create a system that will break people out of this behavior. In that ranting response of yours you never once offered a solution to get the suboptimal players out of their maladaptive behavior; it pretty much boiled down to 'fuck 'em'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

For its detractors, the loss perceived in WoF is too great, whereas at higher complexities losing that agency isn't considered a net loss.

So how come people wouldn't be extra upset at system #1? It's just as complex as system #3 (I noted that an extra die roll had to be thrown in somewhere to control for resolution time) but has even less player agency in it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Just posting this here, thought it seemed relevant for this discussion.

Maybe you people will be convinced with A STUDY FROM COLOMBIA AND STANFORD UNIVERSITY, HMMM?!

http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/articles ... vating.pdf

Although prior research has made a compelling case for the psychological benefits of the provision of choice, there remain some potential limitations to this literature. Consider one seemingly trivial, yet potentially important, methodological characteristic of prior studies: that the number of options presented in previous experiments was characteristically small, typically between two and six alternatives. It would appear, then, that what prior research has actually shown is that choice among relatively limited alternatives is more beneficial than no choice at all.

Presumably,of course, constraints on the number of options offered in past choice studies were imposed primarily for the sake of convenience; however, real-world situations often provide more than a limited selection, sometimes even an overwhelming number of
options. What happens when the range of alternatives becomes larger and the differences among options become relatively small?

Certainly, there are cases when even a vast array of choices may still have beneficial effects. Imagine a group of people who arrive at a new restaurant, for example, all hoping to order their personal favorite dishes. Obviously, the more items offered on the menu, the more satisfied these customers will be, on average. More generally, in preference-matching contexts, in which people enter hoping to find some particular product or service they already know themselves to prefer, larger numbers of options should increase the likelihood that they will be successful in their search.

On the other hand, a growing body of research also suggests that people can have difficulty managing complex choices. To begin with, research has shown that as the attractiveness of alternatives rises, individuals experience conflict and as a result tend to defer decision, search for new alternatives, choose the default option, or simply opt not to choose (Dhar, 1997; Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993; Shafir & Tversky, 1992). Furthermore, consumer research suggests that as both the number of options and the information about options increases, people tend to consider fewer choices and to process a smaller fraction of the overall information available regarding their choices (Hauser & Wernerfelt, 1990). Ed Note: Maybe people will stop saying that we're making this shit up.

In fact, studies show that the selection, evaluation, and integration of information are all clearly affected by the available number of options; this suggests that, as the complexity of making choices rises, people tend to simplify their decision-making processes by relying on simple heuristics (Payne, 1982; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1988, 1993; Timmermans, 1993; Wright, 1975). For instance, a comparison of the decision strategies of people presented with three, six, or nine alternatives revealed that 21% used an elimination strategy in the case of three options, 31% used an elimination strategy in the case of six options, and 77% used an elimination strategy when there were nine options (Timmermans, 1993). The increase in the percentage of participants who used an elimination strategy as the number of alternatives grew was also accompanied by a decrease in the percentage of information used. This sharp decrease in the number of attributes considered as problem complexity increases suggests that information overload may produce a change to a noncompensatory but more efficient decision rule.

The three studies presented in this article, therefore, examine for the first time the possibility that there may be differential motivational consequences of encountering contexts that offer a limited (i.e., psychologically manageable), versus an extensive (i.e., psychologically excessive), number of choices. Specifically, the choice overload hypothesis underlying these studies is that, although the provision of extensive choices may sometimes still be seen as initially desirable, it may also prove unexpectedly demotivating in the end.

In these studies, limited-choice conditions were operationalized as contexts that offered roughly the same number of options (approximately six) as used in past research (e.g., Zuckerman et al., 1978). In comparison, extensive-choice conditions were operationalized as contexts in which participants would have some reasonably large, but not ecologically unusual, number of options.

In addition, to provide a clear test of the choice overload hypothesis, several additional methodological considerations seemed important. On the one hand, to minimize the likelihood of simple preference matching, care was taken to select contexts in which most participants would not already have strong specific preferences. On the other hand, to minimize the potential importance of effortful information search, care was also taken to select tasks for which "right" and "wrong" choices would be subjective, so that the effort involved in making a choice would be largely a function of personal preferences. Finally, across experiments, we sought to examine this hypothesis in both field and laboratory settings. Using these criteria, then, the present studies tested the hypothesis that having a limited and more manageable set of choices may be more intrinsically motivating than having an overly extensive set of choices.

[Lago PARANOIA]

And some more, because this is good stuff.

Perhaps the experience of choice overload is accompanied by the use of more decision rules, which are affective rather than cognitive. Contrary to recent findings by Dhar and Nowlis (1999), the results from our studies suggest that even when a choicemaking situation involves an approach-approach conflict, the provision of choices with uniquely good features does not appear to minimize decision aversion. Being confronted by a plethora of options, each possessing unique attributes, may instead simultaneously attract and repel choice-makers. One wonders then: Do people use affective experiences aroused by choosing as a heuristic for deciding how they ultimately feel about the product? If not such an affective "bleedover," then what else might be accounting for these effects?

Moreover, even when choices are self-generated, it is possible that overly extensive choices may have demotivating consequences. Because people seem to enjoy extensive-choice contexts more than limited-choice contexts, they may sometimes prefer to make available to themselves many more choices than they can possibly handle. Hence, it would be of considerable theoretical interest to examine the effects of extensive-choice contexts that are self-generated, rather than externally generated as in the present studies.

Finally, it is worth considering attributes of contexts in which the provision of extensive choices does not lead to choice overload. To minimize the likelihood of simple preference-matching in the present studies, we selected specific choice-making tasks and prescreened our participant population to ensure that they would not already have strong specific preferences. We all know people who, when confronted by an extraordinary variety of options, know exactly what they want. Is this certainty in preference the result of arduously developed and maintained expertise? The ultimate paradox might be that the only circumstance in which choosers are truly comfortable with extensive choices is when, because of the chooser's previous experience, these choices are perceived as limited in number. Therefore, the precise number of options that would be considered reasonable, as opposed to excessive, may vary as a function of both the chooser's perception of their choicemaking goals and their prior expertise with the subject of choice.

[MfA]

I draw a different conclusion, from one of the sentences you bolded in fact :

although the provision of extensive choices may sometimes still be seen as initially desirable, it may also prove unexpectedly demotivating in the end.

You have to get the people to play your game first before they will even discover this ... so how exactly is giving them what they think they want first (for instance classic vancian casters) while providing them an alternative for when the demotivation sets in not the superior solution?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Because people won't pick the alternative because the Vancian casters will still seem like the more desirable choice even if it turns out they end up unhappy with it. The 'initially' part is key; it turns the decision process into a perpetuating loop of initial satisfaction and then dissatisfaction. Of course if you have the WoF alternative tantalizingly close it may tempt some people to give it a shot and then end up more satisfied with that. Except of course we don't have that much time or space (in either the development process or the actual games) to entertain that amount of frippery. So down the memory hole Vancian goes.

[gourdcaptain]

Okay, I'm just going to say this: this is the least marketable system I have ever seen. Seriously, who is going to come to a game (barring a few game design people) attracted by the idea of having your actions in a round found by rolling on a table? Also - if you think you've seen people start yelling about percieved unfairness, you haven't seen what people are going to do when the healing effects needed to save someone aren't freaking there due to a bloody d100 table (because this is exactly the kind of random table that gets resolved with d100.)

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to start running...

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have no idea why I'm answering an obvious drive-by troll post seriously. Guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

Seriously, who is going to come to a game (barring a few game design people) attracted by the idea of having your actions in a round found by rolling on a table?

You tell me. Seems that Magic: The Gathering is pretty much curbstomping every single TTRPG ever made and it uses that kind of effect. Well, not exactly since the amount of possible hands can't be represented by a reasonably-sized table, but the principle (random rolls determines your options) remains the same.

Also - if you think you've seen people start yelling about percieved unfairness, you haven't seen what people are going to do when the healing effects needed to save someone aren't freaking there due to a bloody d100 table (because this is exactly the kind of random table that gets resolved with d100.)

Well, for one thing the d100 table is a strawman. It's unmanageable and would either require way too many powers to be written or would have a lot of row repeats (but you could just condense the table). I'm skeptical of any setup that requires more than six rows or seven columns and I'd preferably have a setup smaller than even that that.

As to your other comment, a few things come to mind.

A) If healing really is that important to you, you should seed your Matrix such that you're never without a healing option during a round. WoF doesn't prevent you from having access to a stock tactic, it's supposed to prevent you from having access to a specific move. You could totally have Reverse Vampiric Healing, Mass Cure Light Wounds, Cure Major Wounds, and Minor Regeneration all in different rows and they'd all have different uses.

B) You needn't have every power on the WoF table. It's designed to cut down on decision paralysis and ability spam. If you want to call up a game effect that is more generated by monster actions than player actions AND has a totally obvious decision you could just have it on speed dial. Healing would be one of those moves, since no one can predict monster damage output on a micro level and no one autospams healing if they have limited charges.

C) Why have healing in combat at all? 3E showed us that it wasn't necessary and 4E D&D showed us that it can totally kill off any tension in a fight. I'd personally rather healing be a rare once-a-combat thing that you couldn't rely on, like critical hits.

[gourdcaptain]

Not so much trying to troll as having come past here due to google searches turning up some of the more awesome threads including the "Anatomy of Failed Design" and tome threads, lurked for a while (I'll admit it's hard to tell the difference between a relatively long term lurker delurking and a drive-by troll), and then seeing this particular design thread and being amazed that the exact same people who can break down other people's systems in a heartbeat go on this long using the exact same style of tactics and response to challenges, and general "all criticism (usually much more eloquently stated than my own, I'll admit to being a bit rubbish at internet debating) is clearly useless and from trolls" opinion I've seen a half-dozen other places when someone unveils their great new idea.

Although WotC was less active denouncing of contrary opinions with Essentials and more straight up ignoring them, their forum defenders were about as hairtrigger as this.

Finally, card games and TTRPGs are different mediums with different design goals. One is about competitive fights and the other is about cooperative... something. It tends to vary from game to game.

[Username17]

Not so much trying to troll as having come past here due to google searches turning up some of the more awesome threads including the "Anatomy of Failed Design" and tome threads, lurked for a while (I'll admit it's hard to tell the difference between a relatively long term lurker delurking and a drive-by troll), and then seeing this particular design thread and being amazed that the exact same people who can break down other people's systems in a heartbeat go on this long using the exact same style of tactics and response to challenges, and general "all criticism (usually much more eloquently stated than my own, I'll admit to being a bit rubbish at internet debating) is clearly useless and from trolls" opinion I've seen a half-dozen other places when someone unveils their great new idea.

I'm actually very receptive to genuine complaints. I believe that WoF systems are very vulnerable to "Topdecking" responses, and I've discussed and will continue to discuss things to do about that.

But when people say "getting twelve choices at once is better than randomly being offered 6 different ones because it's more choice", what do you say? I mean, it's not. The behavioral science is in, lists of more than half a dozen set members are unmanageable and people are both demotivated and disinclined towards deep tactics when presented with more than six distinct choices. So people making that argument are scientifically, factually wrong. So you tell them a couple times that no, this is in fact a measurable and measured trait in behavioral science, and no it is not. And if they obstinately yell "Yes it is!" enough times there is nothing to do but write them off as reactionary trolls.

The people whining about the difficulties of writing ability sets or the need to write diverse monsters make even less sense, because those statements are complete tangents to whether or not you institute a WoF mechanic to produce a manageable decision set on a turn by turn basis while still maintaining a broad action set overall within the game.

Although WotC was less active denouncing of contrary opinions with Essentials and more straight up ignoring them, their forum defenders were about as hairtrigger as this.

It doesn't count as "hairtrigger" if people repeatedly ignore neuroscience and argue non sequitur for two hundred posts. That's not "hair trigger", that's exasperation. Sooner or later you just have to admit that certain people will not get it, and you need to cut your losses and talk to people who might.

Finally, card games and TTRPGs are different mediums with different design goals. One is about competitive fights and the other is about cooperative... something. It tends to vary from game to game.

There are card games that are RPGs. And there are RPGs that use decks of cards. Not every mechanic from one game can be salvaged for a specific other game. But the people saying that fantasy gamers will never accept a randomized round by round choice set are obviously wrong, because millions of fantasy gamers do exactly that every day.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

There are card games that are RPGs. And there are RPGs that use decks of cards. Not every mechanic from one game can be salvaged for a specific other game. But the people saying that fantasy gamers will never accept a randomized round by round choice set are obviously wrong, because millions of fantasy gamers do exactly that every day.

Millions! Every day! And every one of them, laughing like hyenas because a system like, say, DnD, where a Fighter has the following combat options in a round:

Bull Rush
Charge
Move
Grapple
Trip
Full Attack
Aid Another
Disarm
Feint
Overrun
Sunder

...have too many options. The 3e Fighter. Too many options, as proven by neuroscience.

How can you argue with that?


...


I go out of my way to couch my criticisms of WoF as, "not to my taste, here's what I see as troubles, others will find it a good system". But pretending that complaints are the complaints of madmen is pretty gauche.

Ultimately, it'll depend on implementation. I adore SF:tSG's combat mechanic, but I don't think everyone should. I don't think its the best ever for all purposes and players and games, but for the type of game I like (tactical, round-by-round chess matching) it does wonderfully for meeting my expectations of that genre.

I've played and enjoyed games with less-than-ideal systems. Some of them were outright shitty. But I enjoyed them all the same, warts and all. Some games I thought had brilliant implementation of nifty mechanics (SF:tSG) but that doesn't mean that I'm arrogant enough to dismiss criticisms and opinions.

I don't think including WoF would crash a game. I do wonder if the complexity inherent in managing your matrix adds an unfortunate layer of minmaxing. I also share a lot of PhoneLobster's concerns about how it short-circuits attempts to have more meaningful player input/output in combat since you end up handwaving that away with the WoF column roll. But that doesn't mean its awful, it only means that it puts a lot of weight on its implementation.

I think anyone outright saying WoF is terribad is wrong. But anyone that thinks it solves problems and doesn't replace them with new ones is fooling themselves with its novelty.

[Zinegata]

Eh? Which card games are RPGs that have millions of players? Pokemon?

[Swordslinger]

I think anyone outright saying WoF is terribad is wrong. But anyone that thinks it solves problems and doesn't replace them with new ones is fooling themselves with its novelty.

WoF is good for one thing, and one thing only: It buffers power creep. If you're building a system that tons of people are going to write crap for, WoF can ensure that the broken shivering touch spell only gets used 1/6 times, instead of spammed every turn.

In that regard I can see how WoF might be attractive for a game designer, because it makes the game far less vulnerable to a single broken ability. 4E is the big example of how one broken power can really screw the game, given that every ranger just spams twin strike.

That being said, I still believe that the negatives far outweigh the positives.

[Username17]

Eh? Which card games are RPGs that have millions of players? Pokemon?

There aren't any RPGs that have millions of players any more. Remember: Hundreds of Thousands. There are millions of people who play card games like Magic, and there are card games that are role playing games like Lace & Steel, Engel, and to an extent Everway and the original Deadlands.

Magic the Gathering is "Fantasy Gaming". And it's beating the pants off of TTRPGs.

Oh yeah, also Dragonstorm and Warlord.

-Username17