Winds of Fate needs to be tested in a non-D&D system.

[mean_liar]

This is going right towards where the last WoF thread went: whether its feasible/rewarding to have combat decisions based on immediate conditions and participant interaction, or better to simply handwave away those interactions on a mechanical level and replace them with a cum hoc ergo propter hoc narrative explanation.

I think it would be best for the thread if that discussion be avoided, but no one cares what anyone else thinks on the internet.

I personally think you'd have to come up with a new system to hang WoF on, but for running it through an existing system I imagine that 4eDnD would be the best thing going: few other systems provide the breadth of powers necessary to fill a WoF matrix.

[Username17]

rather than randomly determine what you can do, you should gain/lose a few things based on your last action, and enemies should be vulnerable/invulnerable to a few things based on your last action/their last action, meaning usually you can stop and say "It would be best to use X or Y, unless I want to risk it with Z".

Uh... there are seven goblins in the room. They each did something, causing you to have seven different riders modifying your behavior. And you think this is easy to compute? Are you high?

Look, what you just suggested is that absolutely every ability that anyone uses ever should "just" come with a bullshit 4e-style conditional effect that hamhandedly favors or penalizes some class of maneuvers for you to use next turn. And then every turn you should be forced to remember what all those rider effects are from all the goblins and yourself and probably your allies as well, and then sum them all up for at least three categories of maneuver, and then decide which maneuver you want to use. Is that your final answer? Because that sounds like a special kind of hell. Like playing 4th edition where all accounting had to be maintained in fucking triplicate because you needed to sum your bullshit +1-+3 bonuses and penalties for Scissors, Rocks, and Paper maneuvers separately. And you know what? Chances are pretty damn good that what would actually happen is it would go degenerate anyway when the player realized that if they just put all their discretionary bonuses in Paper and used Paper Chain over and over again that they could consistently maintain a high enough Paper modifier that it wouldn't fucking matter what bullshit temporary disincentives there were to using Paper on a round by round basis.

Keeping track of relative positions between characters sounds cool, but I don't think it's a workable model outside of a duel. Two opposed characters is 1 relative positioning. Three characters is 3 relative positionings. Four characters is 6. Five characters s 10. Six characters is 15. If you have a four person party and an equal number of members of team monster, that it twenty eight relative positionings that you are tracking every turn. The list for one turn no longer fits single column on a sheet of lined paper. This is not a serious suggestion of a workable game mechanic.

4th edition style rider-effects are annoying. And saying that you could fix ability spam by simply making more of them isn't even sane.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

This is going right towards where the last WoF thread went

Well not quite, since Frank is currently accusing various systems of being massively complex (which they may well be) while quietly not mentioning how massively complex WoF itself is as established in those same previous threads.

But hey. Yeah. Lets get back on topic. I liked this thread MUCH better when I was making fun of Lago for approaching WoF like the 4rries approach 4E. His favourite system is massively unpopular? He doesn't reassess his opinion oh no, he decides everyone who hates it are a bunch of "grognards" and tries to plot a convoluted and elaborate three stooges scheme to make them swallow a bitter pill.

I mean this thread wasn't even started on the grounds of "So what sort of game WOULD be good with WoF?" it was started on the grounds of "What game should I use as a bait and switch to inflict WoF on players who already said no when offered WoF up front?"

Seriously this IS exactly one of the things many people around here hate about 4E fan boys, including as far as I was aware Lago himself.

Here is an idea. Sometimes no matter how much you love a mechanic, when your prospective player base HATES it you just have to man up and let it go.

[DragonChild]

Lago did not mention anything about a bait and switch, or tricking players into using it. There are seriously multiple other threads on this - dredge up one of these. There's no reason to spam a thread that wants to do something with old, pointless flamewars.

In any case, from observations I've made from actually using WoF, one of the things I've noticed is that abilities from the same player that inflict, and then take advantage of status/effect X are really hard to string together. Keep this in mind -and I was using a WoF where you had a 50% chance of getting whatever number you wanted for any round.

[mean_liar]

There is a certain entertaining, brassy temerity to the insane confidence in, "THIS piece of non-existent True Scotsman hypothetical vaporware is clearly better than THAT inferior non-existent strawman hypothetical vaporware".

[Username17]

Here is an idea. Sometimes no matter how much you love a mechanic, when your prospective player base HATES it you just have to man up and let it go.

Here's an even better idea: your players actually have no idea how much they like most mechanics, and neither do most of the people on this board. Koumei was just right here on this thread saying how much she liked the idea of mechanics that influenced the modifiers on your different moves differently based on what different maneuvers everyone used the turn before. That's not even a unique position, since lots of people (examples: hogarth, Mean Liar) have put forward theoretical support for exactly that.

But when you put something like that actually at an actual table? When you force them to tabulate the relative effects of one maneuver or another used by twenty different creatures on the relative modifiers of twenty different combat maneuver options? Even if the procedure required no cross referencing at all (which is a simplification that most people claim they don't want), you're still looking at four hundred modifier checks just to see if low swing or quick jab has a better relative modifier this turn. That's not workable. That's laughably unworkable.

And what people say they want is actually way more complicated than that. What they want is for the enemy's sword to be pinned high after their downward swing got parried, opening them up to a potential gut stab. But can you imagine the accounting required to actually produce such a result procedurally? I can, because I've actually seen the early 1980s abortions that were games that tried to do just that. GURPS combat isn't complicated enough to generate those results. I mean, it's complicated enough to drag on its tongue in extremely painful minutiae and be totally unexciting, but it can't tell you whether you should be swinging or stabbing based on your opponent's sword arm placement even so.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

Strawman.

-Username17

Can you imagine how difficult it would be to cross-reference your hit chances against every single opponent's defenses as well as their relative health? That's just mind-bogglingly difficult, the sort of lunacy cooked up by recluses in a shack on their grandparent's acreage and it's simply too insane to imagine any sort of game utilizing a concept as ridiculous as "AC" and "HP" and "saving throws" to any meaningful effect.

[MGuy]

Frank is right. By far and large player's don't know what the fuck is going on. I don't "hate" WoF but I don't think it's the end all be all. I also don't think that it should be judged too harshly until iits implemented. Once it is then we should judge it as harshly as we can. 'Til then I would like to sit and wait to see what turns up.

Edit for ninja post: I think the fair thing to do is wait to see how~ its implemented. It might turn out better than we imagine or worse depending on the end result. 4E had good ideas but the implementation is bad. WoF doesn't sound~ very impressive but the implementation might surprise.

[mean_liar]

I don't think WoF is fatally flawed, it's just not to my taste absent context. I genuinely like tons of RPGs and board games despite their flaws or even because of elements others would/have declared as flaws: the real proof will always be in the pudding.

[hogarth]

Strawman.

-Username17

Can you imagine how difficult it would be to cross-reference your hit chances against every single opponent's defenses as well as their relative health? That's just mind-bogglingly difficult, the sort of lunacy cooked up by recluses in a shack on their grandparent's acreage and it's simply too insane to imagine any sort of game utilizing a concept as ridiculous as "AC" and "HP" and "saving throws" to any meaningful effect.

I think adding conditions like "prone" and "stunned" and "grappled" in the transition from 2E to 3E was a good thing, not a bad thing.

Koumei was just right here on this thread saying how much she liked the idea of mechanics that influenced the modifiers on your different moves differently based on what different maneuvers everyone used the turn before. That's not even a unique position, since lots of people (examples: hogarth, Mean Liar) have put forward theoretical support for exactly that.

Tell me more about this theoretical support; it sounds interesting. Did I say whether it would be substantially different from 3E?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, so, Winds of Fate. The previous thread I made was headed on a collision course with a quick derail and the other thread got too bloated so I'm making this FAQ to lay things out once and for all.

Q: What Winds of Fate?
A: WoF is, at least on this board, using a random element to determine resource management. Because there's so many ways to express randomness you have a wide variety of ways in which this mechanic works.

Some simple examples include:

The Monster Power Recharge mechanic for 4E Monsters, or the Dragon Breath recharge roll.
The Crusader class from Book of Nine Swords
The entire gameplay of most CCGs like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh.


Q: Okay okay, but which version of Winds of Fate do we talk about?
A: After experimenting with several versions, both in theorycraft and actual gameplay, the one generally pushed for TTRPGs at least in this board is called the Green Arrow version. This proposes that all powers are equal or at least within the same ballpark of power (i.e. a wizard can have Hold Person and Suggestion at the same time, but not Hold Person and Weird) and they are all arranged on a rectangular matrix. At the beginning of the first round of combat and at the end of every turn afterwords you roll to see which row you have access to. You can use any powers for the row.


Q: Why did you pick that system over the other Winds of Fate systems?
A: Several reasons.

• The first one is to minimize players' contention over feeling 'screwed by the dice'. It's just a nature of people to get more upset about a run of bad luck than they are happy about a run of good luck. If the rows are generically equal to each other you don't get players going 'man, this is BULLSHIT I rolled a 1 three times in a row RAGEQUIT'.
• The chart-based WoF system was chosen over the card-based WoF system to prevent people from being punished for learning niche maneuvers. For example, in a CCG having a 'this card has a 1% chance of giving you 200% effectiveness if you use it right' hurts you unless you have some way of guaranteeing it showing up your hand when you need it. D&D examples aren't hard to find; Dispel Magic, Banishment, Command Undead, etc.. give you great bennies over other spells of their level but screw you over if you have them prepared when you don't need them. This discourages people from using them at all.
• People roll at the end of their turn so that they can think over their options while other people are going through their turns. If you can push some of the 'decision making' phase when you're not waiting on them that's great.
• The powers are close to each other in level and maximum effect because you don't want people automatically ignoring the ones that are too-weak--otherwise why have them? However, making all of the powers the same level would require too much writing for a class and level-based system. Which is the system this was originally designed for.
• The large volume of powers give characters some variety from round to round.

Q: What was wrong with the previous systems that D&D used?
A: To understand why the proponents of Winds of Fate are dissatisfied with the system that D&D uses (particularly charge casting), you need to understand the design goals of the system.

• Lift the burden of long-term and short-term resource management from players.
• Break people out of Five Moves of Doom.
• Discourage tactical spam.
• Give the system some room for accomodating overpowered abilities.
• Give people large ability lists without inducing option paralysis or forcing people to use heuristics.

Q: Why do you want to make it so that players don't care as much about managing powers?
A: At first glance this seems to be a bad design goal; one of the central ideas of strategy is how decisions made in the past will influence the future. And everyone loves strategy, right? The problem is that experience has told us that players don't appreciate long-term resource management as we thought. For example, because of the way D&D manages the advancement system, magical item system, and wealth-by-level system, micromanaging consumables usually leads to more power than going 'fuck it' and going for a fire-and-forget resource. The classic example are mage armor potions for 3E monks. It's actually quite possible to budget them so that you will always get the bonus to AC that you will always need, but few players outside of optimizers like doing this even when told of the tactic because it requires detailed budgeting knowledge. The sad fact of the matter is that a lot of players don't like planning long-term for unknowns even if they could do it. So players routinely engage in maladaptive behavior like cheating the 15-minute workday or going 'fuck it' and spending extra money for a permanent armor enchantment when they could've done it for cheaper and almost as reliably with consumables.

The other side is that even on a small time scale it's another variable to track. This can get rather complicated for systems like rage meters or cooldown timers, which require tracking several variables at once.


Q: What is Five Moves of Doom?
A: It's a professional wrestling reference to a moveset by Bret Hart. Instead of just having a signature move, he had a signature move sequence: suplex (or Atomic Drop), legsweep, backbreaker, elbowdrop from the second rope, and then his actual signature move the Sharpshooter. While there was some variation such as getting interrupted on the elbowdrop he generally ended most matches this way.

D&D has plenty of examples. For example, in an encounter where a 4E Ranger is budgeted a action point and daily, his Fives Moves of Doom would be: Action Point w/ Attacks on the Run --> Hunter's Quarry --> Twin Strike --> Minor Action Encounter Attack Power --> Minor Action Encounter Attack Power.

In other words, it's a cheeky way of saying 'script'.


Q: What do you mean by using scripts?
A: D&D's power sorting algorithm in 3E and 4E D&D is so strong that it rarely pays off to deviate from them. Meaning that playing 'correctly' also means that your character is being repetitive 3E D&D's sorting algorithm is slightly more flexible than 4E D&D's (for many wrong reasons) but it's still too efficient to allow any real variety.


Q: What power sorting algorithm does D&D use?
A: Spell levels and Combat/Noncombat spells. Unless you're specifically saving a power for later all things being equal it behooves you to use your strongest spell when facing an opponent you perceive of being of equal or greater level. If you do not have any spells budgeted of the highest level, you move to the next highest. And so on. It's so efficient that experienced players can handle having 40+ spells prepared without being stymied by their options. More on this later.


Q: Why are using scripts bad?
A: They're boring. Both because people can recognize the script after a few times and won't be impressed with mintor alterations and also because it discourages outside-the-box thinking. Of course a lot of game designers try many ways to break people from using scripts, with little success.


Q: What's the difference between a script and tactical spam?
A: The feat, role, and magical item system of D&D encourages people to hyperspecialize in one particular tactic and continue using it, creating repetitiveness. The classic examples are the Spiked Chain Tripster and the Spirited Charger. Neither characters have any reason to consider game effects that don't enhance the specialty that they alread possess. Due to the way the game is constructed there is a huge amount of overlap between scripts and tactical spam, but there have been characters who engage in tactical spam without following a clear script--such as a wizard who has a bunch of entanglement-punishing effects but has a large selection of entangle spells to choose from.


Q: Why do people engage in tactical spam/follow scripts in the first place?
A: You can spend all days pontificating on the morality or tactical sense or whatever of players and DMs and game designers but the basic reason why people tend to be inflexible in the decision phase of power processing even if the game has genuine tactical depth and is balanced to avoid a priori tactics is peoples' reliance on heuristics.


Q: What is a heuristic and why are you so down on them?
A: In its most basic terms a heuristic is a process used to organize or eliminate basic options to something manageable. For example, say Sally was trying to find a friend's house for a birthday party but didn't know where she lived aside from being on Washington Street. If Sally checks every house on the block then she's not using a heuristic. If Sally goes 'I think my friend lives in a brick house, so only check brick houses' or 'only check every other house' then she's using one.

The obvious problem is that while a heuristic will save time if Sally is correct, if she's not (Sally lives in an even-numbered house and/or lives in a wood house) then she's not going to pick the right house. If Sally only has 6 houses to check then she can actually check every one of them and her chances of finding the right house are much higher. If Sally is forced to eliminate 18 houses out of 24 first then there's a good chance that she eliminated the wrong house.

The important thing to keep in mind about heuristics is that people apply them BEFORE actually making decisions. It'd be like someone telling you first I would drive to the store. Then I would turn on my car. If anyone tells you that they would evaluate the options and then apply a heuristic then they either didn't realize how complicated the search would be or they're full of shit.


Q: What does this have to do with D&D?
A: The applications to D&D are obvious. For example, ask someone relatively experienced with the game what would they do if they were facing a group of goblins adventurers and you were, say, a Wizard. Many people would generally tell you that they would spam AoEs against this large group even though the correct tactic might be to take out one particular member first (they're providing the group shield/healing) or to throw up a wall of fire to block the arrows or whatever. It seems obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight that it was a knee-jerk response but that's the danger of using a heuristic. Generically using an AoE would be the best option, but for this specific situation it might not be. But people applied the heuristic before they evaluated their other options or looked at the tactical situation.


Q: Wouldn't the answer be to construct a better heuristic?
A: What would be the better construction? As far as elimination strategies go, the 'big group/use AoE' will produce more successful results, just not as often as carefully evaluating all of the powers. The only way they would be able to break themselves out of that mindset is if they constructed a new heuristic on the fly such as 'hey, these are fire goblins, let's narrow it down to ice powers'.

People tend to construct heuristics based on inflexible inputs like 'entangling powers' or 'elemental keywords'. This is so that they don't have to continually keep reconstructing the sorting algorithm. Yes, some people do construct heuristics based on mutuable parameters such as 'where is the enemy located relatively to me', but only if they're forced to or they actually have time to evaluate all of the options. Whether this is done out of laziness, risk aversion, or time pressures is irrelevant. It happens all the same.


Q: What's wrong with that? In fact, isn't that the entire goal of D&D on the DM's side: to present a variety of tactical situations that players will have to use out-of-the-box thinking of? Who cares if they're punished for it
(placed in red for special emphasis, this is an important point)
A: This may be the goal of D&D but this doesn't actually happen for a variety of reasons. This is actually mostly a repost of what I said in another thread. Spoiled.

DM/Game Designer-Side Problems

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. In the next spoiler.

Player-Side Problems

The thing that people fantasize about where players have many 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.

And all this is before we get into the other 'wrong' side about having so many choices that you have to use heuristics.


Q: That's really depressing. Are games really destined to be that inflexible?
A: No, not really. Even in tactically shallow games like Dungeons and Dragons 4E there are still some genuine tactical decisions to be made if the game was designed better (no overly narrow specialization, no power sorting, etc.). For example, should the Wizard use Maze of Mirrors on a group of melee barbarians and give the party a round of breathing room or should he blind the enemy mezzer before said enemy unloads with an AoE Save Ends Daze? The point this is trying to get across is that there just isn't enough room in the game or player psychology to make diversity and tactical depth a game completely dependent on the DM. It also needs to come from player-side. And it needs to happen more often than it did in 3E and 4E D&D.


Q: What's Wind of Fates' guarantee that people will actually start looking over their moves once they're in this system?
A: Winds of Fate in of itself won't automatically ensure that you will get tactical depth by players carefully considering every permutation of the moves. People who have played CCGs will refer to a phenomenom known as 'topdecking'. This occurs when a players' options are so limited that they mindlessly use powers anyway because they have no other choice. This isn't a problem specific to Winds of Fate but of the power system in general. It's just more noticeable in WoF because the per-round power selection tends to be smaller than charge or magic point-based resource management systems.


Q: Even so, is the tradeoff of reducing player choice worth that of getting rid of option paralysis and move scripting?
A: No resource management system--hell, no system in general lets you use whatever moves whenever you want. You don't get to use your super-special melee move if you're out of range. If you used a fireball against the giants earlier and then trolls come up, tough cookiepuss.


Q: Right, but it's still LESS choice than power charges/Vancian. So why not give players more choice?
A: That's intentional. You don't actually want to give players too much choice.


Q: Don't give players too much choice? What kind of Gygaxian crap is that?
A: It's not Gygaxian crap, it's just an element of basic psychology. A lot of studies have shown that there is actually a limited amount of choice that you want to give humans, usually 6 to 12 distinct options. Adding more choices than that demotivates people and makes them less happy than if they had a small selection of choice.


Q: Why does too much choice frustrate people?
A: No one really knows for certain. Maybe they don't like to spend too much time going over decisions. Maybe they're afflicted by the 'grass is greener' phenomenom and too many choices allows them too much opportunity to second-guess themselves. The 'why' isn't important, just that it happens.


Q: Is that why people use heuristics?
A: Yup. It's to neem down a large selection of choices to something manageable right from the beginning. But these are the important things:
1) Even when humans mentally squeeze down the selection to something manageable just the process of using heuristics makes the decision process less fun. It's hard to say whether the initial array of choices caused the demotivation or whether using the heuristic did it, but there you go.

2) As discussed earlier, heuristics lead to shallow tactics. These two things in conjunction should lead us to believe that the old system of having 15+ potential powers to pick from needs to be reformed.


Q: So how many choices do you actually want to give people?
A: The maximum amount of choices round-to-round a player makes before it starts to frustrate decision-makers is actually pretty small. Studies give a range of 6 to 12 before acts start getting demotivated, but the larger ends concern outcomes that are universally positive. The studies have noted that when there is a 'right' and a 'wrong' answer (which of the choices will give you 10 dollars as opposed to which kind of ice cream you want) the list narrows. Moreover Dungeons and Dragons also has a large list of multi-purpose powers like Wall of Stone and Silent Image which have nested choices in them. You want to have them on the low end.


Q: Yes, but won't people will still want to pick the option that gives them more initial choices?
A: When the studies gave people a choice to select from a large list of options or a small list of options, people gravitated towards the large list. However, after said selection was done the small list people still ended up with more aggregate satisfaction (despite lower initial satisfaction). A cynical person would say that peoples' eyes are bigger than their stomachs. A less cynical person would tell you to look up 'naive optimization' on wikipedia for more information on why people do that.

Regardless, it's just best to cut the crap and make the round-to-round choices limited from the get-go.


Q: So what does this have to do with Winds of Fate?
Winds of Fate is actually supposed to increase the number of powers a player has available to them. The number of distinct powers a player can pick from in a round has a hard limit set to it by human psychology. But without some additional factor people would be using the same 6-12 powers every round over and over again. This is to allow a character to have a potential combat maneuver list of 40+ powers while still keeping it manageable. And keeping it manageable is important because otherwise people make shallow and incorrect tactical combat decisions.


Q: Why can't you do this with power charges or mana points or whatever? For example, each round they get 6 distinct choices to pick from?
A: Because then you'd cycle back into the 5MoD/ability spam problem. Moreover, it wouldn't exactly satisfy the people who are concerned about the lack of round-to-round choice. Because you can't predict encounters or the flow of combat ahead of time, to an outside observer or even yourself your 3rd Round power selection you set up an hour ago isn't any different from randomly rolling it.


Q: Why would people still use a script even when the choices are down to a manageable number?
A: There's no guarantee that people would do that. As noted in the above spoilered rant, there will still be a number of players at the table who will insist on being risk averse or lazy or will just not have good tactical sense and will stick to a small array of moves. The small selection of choices is supposed to help people who are overwhelmed by the decision-making process (which is everyone after a certain point) and discourage them from using heuristics just to get the choices down to a manageable size. The round-by-round randomness portion is supposed to prevent movespam or scripting from these holdouts.


Q: But what do I do if I have a super-special awesome move that I want to use in Winds of Fate but it doesn't come up? I'll be stuck using something else.
A: That's intentional.

People think that they're being clever by finding a move that's situationally works and spamming it until the combat is over, but in all actuality you're being boring and predictable. It's okay to now and then have the lights come on and go 'Fire Slash is going to work AWESOME against this ice elemental' but once you've had your Eureka moment you should really be using something else.


Q: But I don't have any real standout moves as good as Fire Slash in every round for this encounter.
A: So? It's not like all of your moves are equivalent in utility. You might not have a move in your arsenal as effective as Fire Slash or whatever, but you'll still have moves available this round that are more effective than your other ones. It's your job to sniff it out and use it.

[Josh_Kablack]

There is a certain entertaining, brassy temerity to the insane confidence in, "THIS piece of non-existent True Scotsman hypothetical vaporware is clearly better than THAT inferior non-existent strawman hypothetical vaporware".

Valid point.

I move that we call that Heisenburg Scotsman argument.

Can anyone here link me to any actual game session logs involving any sort of WoF implementation that I myself didn't post?



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But as to the more potentially interesting discussion coming out of this thread

I figure you can have three positions: Prone, Standing, Aerial
You are normally Prone, but leaping, flying and getting knocked into the air make you Aerial, and crouching, meleeing with Prone foes and being smacked down make you Prone. Usually you revert to Standing at the start of your turn, unless you specifically stay down/up.

So Awesome Uppercut or Rainbow Spiral Heart Attack makes your opponent Aerial - and your allies can use Thunder Dragon or Space Turbulence on them until their turn, where they land. Or you can perform a Jump Kick and be Aerial until your next turn. Or you perform a Moonsault and become Prone until your next turn, but someone hits you with a Figure-4, keeping both of you Prone.

Your mini, if you use them, will be normal, lying flat, or elevated on a small block.

Then there's Fatigue, which requires putting a little token in front of you. Some things Fatigue you, and being below 1/2 HP or whatever automatically does. You can lose the status only when your HP are above this - by taking a nap (out of combat) or having an ability used on you. But you still have to be above 1/2 HP to do that. This doesn't give an actual numeric penalty to keep track of, it just means you can't use Mars Flame Sniper at all, and your opponent is able to OHKO you with Gamma Ray.

Any other status effect will generally have more to do with what you can and cannot do than a numeric thing:
Sealed: you can't use any special powers and lose the benefits of your transformation
Stunned: you can't take any active actions, merely move
Paralysed: you can't move at all, and are auto-hit
Blind: you (can't use aimed attacks/have a 50% miss chance/whatever)
Pumped: you ignore Fatigue
Invisible: see Blind, reverse it
Tangled: you can't move about, use Aerial attacks or attack with your legs

And a few others like that. Then I'd try to figure out a consistent duration style - maybe a set number of rounds (which becomes annoying the more you have to keep track of), a 5+ on 1d6 Saving Throw at the end of each turn, "until the fight ends/healed" (harsh) or whatever.

But yeah. Learning from the mistakes of 4e seems to be a no-brainer.

Sorry to be the one to point this out, but that's post is actually a pretty good example of NOT learning from the mistakes of 4e.

4e had a billion little conditions that barely mattered. To make a workable system where such conditions determine tactics round by round based on conditions you need FEWER conditions, each of which mattered more - not not more conditions which mattered less.

Frank's right it that it gets very difficult to track multiple conditions in team-on-team fights. But Frank's wrong in that such a game is entirely unplayable - anyone who has played the past 2 editions of D&D has played in a game with well over a dozen status conditions. Pages 300-301 of the 3.5 DMG list THIRTY EIGHT different status conditions (and that list is not actually exhaustive. Page 277 of the 4e PHB lists 16 different conditions, and those are just the negative ones omitting numeric penalties, vulnerabilities and ongoing damage. 3e condition tracking wasn't so bad because a lot of conditions rendered lesser conditions meaningless and most of the time you only had a couple to worry about in any given fight. Where 4e got crazy was that the conditions changed round-by-round and often multiple times per round.

For a system like the one you want to have any chance of working it either has to be limited to an absolute maximum of 7 conditions which matter for attacks and make sure that the accounting for when they change isn't a bookkeeping nightmare.

Given the general BS I've heard about human cognition, such a system is probably workable if you map all of your conditional attack onto 7 or fewer specific trigger conditions:


Here're my first thoughts for a tighter group of such conditions:

Fatigued (or Bloodied in 4e terms) - this isn't so bad, we're already tracking HP.

Airborne / Standing / Prone - these are questionable. They are easy to map with minis and they could be used to give a fighting-game type feel (as long as you avoid nonsense like uppercut knocking people out of a legsweep) - but they are three whole conditions to track which takes up a lot of the available space.

Vulnerable (similar to Granting Combat Advantage in 4e or Flat-Footed in 3e. Except without the AC penatly, just the opening to Sneak Attack and the many similar moves we intend to have).

Open (This is the other half of Granting Combat Advantage / Flat-Footed, you become easier to hit for various reasons). Or possibly we recombine these two back nto one to save space and confusion. (this is still the brainstorming phase)

Now if you need to add other conditions you can map them to those for purposes of which attacks trigger.

So everything else you want looks something like:
If you are Blind, you become OPEN and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Tangled, you become VULNERABLE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Blown Away, you become AIRBORNE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Tripped, you become PRONE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Stunned, you become OPEN and VULNERABLE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH

[MGuy]

Lago. Your repost of the events leaves a bit to be desired. Question I've asked but never had answered are not on this list like:

Why is there no "deck search" mechanic for your moves as is in the CCGs that this system is supposed to imitate? If your conclusion is that people have more fun with CCGs and you want to copy the system with the express purpous of people having more fun, then why do you want to force people to not have that popular option?

You acknowledge that you want to use the Green Arrow option but that option leads to palette swap moves. If most of your moves, except your supers, are basically palette swaps of the same auto attack/at will powers then how is it that making you choose at random from what is practically the same maneuver any better than people just using 5moD?

You acknowledge that you intentionally cut down people's choices after having several paragraphs complaining that people cut down their choices. You, within the same post, complain about people cutting out their options then acknowledge that this system just does it anyway. If either way people are losing the lion's share of their options how is this system "better"? You limit the tactical decision making of players (purposefully) because people won't make tactically deep decisions. How is one better than the other?

You acknowledge that some moves will be better than others and that its the player's job to figure out which ones are yet the entire purpose/intent of this system supposes that player's can't actually do that. Sure you might say "with less options player's will think about it with more depth" but if your idea of how people use heuristics is correct than player's are already cutting down their options to a manageable number and should be able to sniff out the best option then no? This is especially true when you mention vanician spellcasting because your spell levels neatly separate your spells up for you and if you're only looking at the top of the list options then you cut your options down quite well at that point which, by your volition, should allow players to then sniff out their best option among those. Now you might then say, "but they are cutting out what could be other viable options" to which I would reply, they do the same thing in WoF but instead of it being the player a dice roll cut your options.

You say its boring for a player to spam the same moves. I agree. However you also say that its boring if they do that when its not their only option. At which point I'd have to ask "for who?". I don't like 3ED because you pretty much (if you're not a spellcaster) only rely on your best shtick to do anything in the game. If you don't~ have to and you choose to do it anyway then that seems like its the player deciding that's what s/he "wants" to do. If that is the case then why should I care?

[RadiantPhoenix]

There are no tutors because having tutors means you have to look at all 20-40 of your equivalent-level powers at once, and that loses most of the benefit of the system; being able to actually use any of those powers loses the rest.

Why does the green-arrow method lead to palette-swap moves? I mean, you could use it with just palette-swaps, but there's no reason you have to.

WoF cutting down on people's choices is better than heuristics because heuristics generally give the same results each time, and that's not as interesting as a constraint that generates different results most of the time.

[quanta]

Why is there no "deck search" mechanic for your moves as is in the CCGs that this system is supposed to imitate?

For all the CCGs, I've played the reason "deck search" is not so good an idea is this. It's hard to thread the needle and not end up with either

A) Like 1/5-1/4 of a good deck is deck search and card draw. This is seriously how some Pokemon decks ran early on when the number of trainers you could have was uncapped. How to build a pokemon deck went something like this
1) Put four Bills in deck.
2) Put four Professor Oaks in deck.
3) Add 4-6 search cards to deck.
4) Now consider what sort of deck you're actually building and what Pokemon you want to use.

And spending lots of deck space on this was brutally better than focusing on your actual Pokemon.

B) Deck search is so rare and expensive that it doesn't usually make a big difference. At that point, why complicate the mechanic or punish noobs by handing them a chainsaw they might cut their leg off.

So yeah. Deck search has issues.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why is there no "deck search" mechanic for your moves as is in the CCGs that this system is supposed to imitate? If your conclusion is that people have more fun with CCGs and you want to copy the system with the express purpous of people having more fun, then why do you want to force people to not have that popular option?

It's not supposed to emulate a CCG at all, since I know no CCG that uses charts/matrices. I just used CCGs as an example of where a random resource management system has been used with success. So any questions of 'why don't you do it more like a CCG' will be met with 'because it's a TTRPG and I'll only do it more like a CCG if it'll enhance play experience'.

Now then, the reason why CCGs have search options in the deck is to make niche cards playable. Otherwise you'll often just have a crap hand and people will play it safe and go for vanilla beatsticks. However in a chart-based system having niche maneuvers doesn't hurt you; the only reason for search is to have the ability to use maneuvers you don't have available for the turn. But this just forces people back into using heuristics, option paralysis, and ability spam because they suddenly have a lot more options available. Which defeats the point of the system!

You acknowledge that you want to use the Green Arrow option but that option leads to palette swap moves.

Who the fuck said that?! It doesn't encourage palette swap moves more than any other fucking resource management system ever made.

WoF is a resource management system. Palette Swap moves are a function of the powers system. They intersect but have nothing to do with each other other than the former using the latter as input.

You acknowledge that you intentionally cut down people's choices after having several paragraphs complaining that people cut down their choices. You, within the same post, complain about people cutting out their options then acknowledge that this system just does it anyway. If either way people are losing the lion's share of their options how is this system "better"? You limit the tactical decision making of players (purposefully) because people won't make tactically deep decisions. How is one better than the other?

but if your idea of how people use heuristics is correct than player's are already cutting down their options to a manageable number and should be able to sniff out the best option then no?

The human mind and time pressures of gameplay will automatically neem down a list of options to which someone will seriously consider. This isn't negotiable, it happens with whatever system you use with too many options.

The thing is that when people put up a mental filtering criteria the odds are that a player will use an inefficient or inflexible filter is very high. Which means that this leads to shallow tactical decision making. You saw it in the previous thread; people were dead-set on using AoE or an entangling power before they evaluated the tactical situation. Like, they didn't even consider using anything else. So when you introduce very simple complications or benefits (such as this mass of critters are cowardly and will surrender if they lose a fourth or more of their members) it leads to people picking wrong decisions.

If you keep the number of options manageable at the outset people don't apply heuristics. Meaning that they can evaluate all of their powers in a reasonable timeframe and have a smaller chance of being thrown off by complications.

This is especially true when you mention vanician spellcasting because your spell levels neatly separate your spells up for you and if you're only looking at the top of the list options then you cut your options down quite well at that point which, by your volition, should allow players to then sniff out their best option among those.

Yes, and when you do that it leads to scripting. The two filters that 3E uses (combat versus noncombat, spell levels) is so efficient that you have a good chance of guessing what spells someone are going to use in an encounter if you have nothing more than their unexpended spell list and what spells they used in previous encounters.

Now you might then say, "but they are cutting out what could be other viable options" to which I would reply, they do the same thing in WoF but instead of it being the player a dice roll cut your options.

What you're not getting is that the spell level heuristic always cuts out those options. Unless the player is trying to game the workday, there's absolutely no reason for an 11th level wizard to spend too much time looking at their 2nd-level and probably even 3rd level spells. In Winds of Fate the chances that a wizard will use these niche options goes upwards.

You say its boring for a player to spam the same moves. I agree. However you also say that its boring if they do that when its not their only option. At which point I'd have to ask "for who?".

For both the player and everyone else at the table. I'm sure you could tell many a story about someone who was forced to break out of their routine and ended up really enjoying it but it was also noted that if they weren't forced to do it then they would've selected the suboptimal, risk adverse experience.

Seriously though, if you want to give a play experience so shallow that your character actions can be done on a small decision tree on a graphing calculator, a complicated combat RPG just isn't for you. You're just wasting everyone's time, including your own. Play something less small-scale tactical oriented.

[Orion]

Re: The argument from psych studies

The business about 6 to 12 choices being optimal reminds of something else I've read a lot about, which is that people can only hold 6 or 7 arbitrary factoids in their heads at once. However, with practice, people can learn how to remember strings of dozens of arbitrary digits. They do this by "chunking" the list into six or seven subunits which hang together in some way, each of which has at most 6 units of its own which might be further subdivided.

Does anyone know whether a similar "chunking" process could be effective for choices? What happens if you arbitrarily break the move list down into subgroups. Maybe your character has 5 "blue spells" 5 "red spells" 5 "white spells" and 5 "black spells" all usable at will. That's 20 choices, but to make his decision, he goes through each sublist, flags 1 or 2 as potentially applicable, then chooses his actual action from among the ~6 that he flagged on his first pass.

[MGuy]

Seriously though, if you want to give a play experience so shallow that your character actions can be done on a small decision tree on a graphing calculator, a complicated combat RPG just isn't for you. You're just wasting everyone's time, including your own. Play something less small-scale tactical oriented.

Rereading your post for more but for this part. With nothing but palette swap moves and a super move or two in what you're suggesting I could script all my combats for all time thusly.

Roll WoF:
Is appropriate niche ability/weakness present in row? Y/N
Is Super in row? Y/N
If both are no use any move.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Well, I suppose you could have a couple different sets of five moves of doom without a tremendous amount of difficulty; for example, you might have a chain of moves that goes like "daze, penalize will save, charm, penalize will save more, dominate," and one that goes "cut off advance, cut off retreat, cut off maneuvering, paralyze, petrify," but you ultimately only have two moves, they're just composed of several components each.

EDIT:

Rereading your post for more but for this part. With nothing but palette swap moves and a super move or two in what you're suggesting I could script all my combats for all time thusly.

Roll WoF:
Is appropriate niche ability/weakness present in row? Y/N
Is Super in row? Y/N
If both are no use any move.

Why do you presume these moves are even significantly palette swaps?

Let's suppose your WoF matrix is the SRD cleric 1st level spell list, as follows:

d6
1	Bane	Hide from Undead	Comprehend Languages	Protection from Chaos/Evil/Good/Law	Detect Undead
2	Bless	Inflict Light Wounds	Cure Light Wounds	Remove Fear	Divine Favor
3	Bless Water	Magic Stone	Curse Water	Sanctuary	Doom
4	Cause Fear	Magic Weapon	Deathwatch	Shield of Faith	Endure Elements
5	Command	Obscuring Mist	Detect Chaos/Evil/Good/Law	Summon Monster I	Entropic Shield
6	ROLL AGAIN

Admittedly, some of these are non-combat, but most could find a use in a combat encounter; the only palette swap seems to be bless/curse water.

EDIT 2: removed some floating 'M's

[Lago PARANOIA]

MGuy, no one said anything about supermoves or palette swaps. Why do you keep bringing that shit up?

[MGuy]

You said you were going with Green Arrow version of this WoF thing. When this was extrapolated upon in another thread it basically boiled down to "Move does damage + other shit I don't care about". IE Boxing Arrow, Shock Arrow, Exploding Arrow. Then there are niche moves like "Bola" Arrow and "Net" Arrow. And whatever "overpowered moves" you would want. Now I assume there's a "super move" because part of the Pros for this system is that you could have overpowered moves and not be hurt by it. So assuming that any and all players are going to slap that on their list I constructed a script for your system with the palette swap "arrows" and the "overpowered" abilities in mind.

[Kaelik]

Q: Why is Lago an idiot?

A: Because he talks about his own personal preferences as if they were the only correct preferences, and consistently ignores anything that anyone else has to say.

Q: Why is this in the form of a q/a?

A: Because it lends a sense of authority, and gives the impression that it is conveying an objective answer, instead of just spelling out subjective preferences that are not shared by most people who are not Lago.

[Blicero]

There is a certain entertaining, brassy temerity to the insane confidence in, "THIS piece of non-existent True Scotsman hypothetical vaporware is clearly better than THAT inferior non-existent strawman hypothetical vaporware".

Valid point.

I move that we call that Heisenburg Scotsman argument.

Can anyone here link me to any actual game session logs involving any sort of WoF implementation that I myself didn't post?

For my gaming group, I redid the other two Tome of Battle classes to make them use a matrixbased WoF. One of my players is a Warblade. However, the semester ended before we could really play enough to get a feel for it, and we won't have another chance to start up until fall semester starts. Then I will presumably be able to provide other accounts of WoF in use.

[Blasted]

Here're my first thoughts for a tighter group of such conditions:

Fatigued (or Bloodied in 4e terms) - this isn't so bad, we're already tracking HP.

Airborne / Standing / Prone - these are questionable. They are easy to map with minis and they could be used to give a fighting-game type feel (as long as you avoid nonsense like uppercut knocking people out of a legsweep) - but they are three whole conditions to track which takes up a lot of the available space.

Vulnerable (similar to Granting Combat Advantage in 4e or Flat-Footed in 3e. Except without the AC penatly, just the opening to Sneak Attack and the many similar moves we intend to have).

Open (This is the other half of Granting Combat Advantage / Flat-Footed, you become easier to hit for various reasons). Or possibly we recombine these two back nto one to save space and confusion. (this is still the brainstorming phase)

Now if you need to add other conditions you can map them to those for purposes of which attacks trigger.

So everything else you want looks something like:
If you are Blind, you become OPEN and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Tangled, you become VULNERABLE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Blown Away, you become AIRBORNE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Tripped, you become PRONE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH
If you are Stunned, you become OPEN and VULNERABLE and also BLAHBLAHBLAH

I like this. I think I will use it, possibly renaming open to immobile or something.
I already have a fatigue system, so will drop that.

[PhoneLobster]

Who the fuck said that?! It doesn't encourage palette swap moves more than any other fucking resource management system ever made.

Except for that bit where it has like what? 36 "equally viable moves" broken into groups that cover the same ground so you are never entirely without that "I do damage" or "I do whatever" move in little groups of six.

Pallet swap is VERY much the direction that pushes.

Also complexity. From level 1 to level ? each and every PC has 36 "equally viable" powers that "cover similar ground" to sit down and KNOW and sift through and differentiate and as they advance those will change and... good god is that a stupid amount of powers.

So you've officially hitched your band wagon to Green Arrow. The WoF implementation so bad it looked like a Strawman. OK. Get writing your several hundred powers, for that one character archetype, you will be needing to start early after all... but remember as you write all those powers that cover the same bases over and over again and then over AGAIN with level advancement... no pallet swaps! WoF apparently doesn't encourage or require you to do that as you write "I shoot it!" 6 times over times 20 times over times infinity!