Making a Fantasy Game (PhoneLobster, please stay out)

[virgil]

If you try to compare it to the movement of a ship, then a moving focal point for displacement is akin to having a tugboat with a rope tied to it and the towed ship.

There will be stresses generated on the rope from pulling, but assuming that it has infinite elasticity (among other things) won't hurt things when it's unable to be physically interacted with aside from the force between the focal point and the stone; magnets do not worry about elasticity when attracting each other, for example.

Using a magical tether won't give you a free thermodynamic lunch, it will just make it closer to an ideal machine (or spherical cow, whichever). The closest thing to a free lunch is the fact a single sky mage outputs enough energy to displace a ship at appreciable speeds.

Assuming a tech level just out of the bronze age to limit the 'abuses' here, we can now place everything that a windmill and watermill was used for without regard for location. Depending on the machinery designed, it could create a system of much greater efficiency.

[RandomCasualty2]

Holy shit, you're right. We could also simplify things by making all quest-important NPCs invulnerable and make the cursors urn red when they move over enemies.

I don't think it's going that deep into video game land to want immovable continents. I mean for normal mundane continents or islands, we don't worry what happens if the fighter tries to push them with a strength check. We just say "You fail." because for game purposes you're just not going to push the island of Crete anywhere. I don't care if you've got 40 paragon krakens chained to the island and pulling. Crete just isn't going anywhere.

And that's okay, because people can accept that.

Similarly, I think most people can accept if a floating island just can't be moved. And we probably don't want some complex formula where we're calculating in the mass of the island, the newtons of force involved in moving it and the elasticity constant just for the sake of giving islands physics. It really doesn't add anything to the game except for a DM headache.

The problem in D&D is that it's actually really easy to create weight. You can take a decanter of endless water and effectively make something as heavy as you want, so long as it can hold a large volume somewhere in its shape. So now if you've got islands that people can sink, you've got to worry about people using them as crushing devices, and then you've got to know how much damage a crushing island does, which leads to even more rules.

The floating island problem seems more a case of anal simulationism than anything else. In 99% of your games, people really won't care enough to try to move the island, and even if they do, nobody is going to go crazy if you just say the island can't be moved without magic. Does doing a complex physics equation for moving a floating island really help the game? Or can we live without that math?

[TavishArtair]

I don't think it's going that deep into video game land to want immovable continents. I mean for normal mundane continents or islands, we don't worry what happens if the fighter tries to push them with a strength check. We just say "You fail." because for game purposes you're just not going to push the island of Crete anywhere. I don't care if you've got 40 paragon krakens chained to the island and pulling. Crete just isn't going anywhere.

...

The floating island problem seems more a case of anal simulationism than anything else. In 99% of your games, people really won't care enough to try to move the island, and even if they do, nobody is going to go crazy if you just say the island can't be moved without magic.

If there's nothing magical about a god damn demigod seamonster, nevermind 40 of them, then I don't want to play your game. Beings of Herculean strength should be allowed to pick up and use mountains as weapons. Indeed, this is usually how islands are reputed to form. A god was practicing juggling one day, or bored, or had to beat the crap out of a monster with a sufficiently large landmass.

Now, you can make this arbitrarily difficult, but this seems to be a contradiction. "You can't move it even if you hook up a few dozen magical beasts" versus "you can't move it without magic." What's the point of the monster being magical then?

[MartinHarper]

Beth: I'm afraid you've lost me. I was expecting the lack of relative moment to ensure that there was no loss to spring friction, but apparently not. Is there a reference you could give that explains this situation?

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"immovable" (relative to the planet's core) floating islands are fine by me. They do pose some questions, though:
1) If they are immovable, how did they get up there?
2) Can I build a castle out of immovable rocks, or build a castle and make that immovable?
3) Can I mine them or dig foundations in them?

Additionally, they don't explain skyships, so you still need something that explains those. Frank's plan seems to be to have a form of magic that explains floating islands and skyships (and, potentially, other stuff too), rather than having different magics for everything in the game.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'd just like to say that this discussion is a thing a pure beauty. I'm sure that once you've adapted your exact theoretical model of floatstone physics to game rules, determining the thermodynamics of pyromancy will be a snap.


Out of curiosity, what recourse do game designers who don't learn physics have?

[Username17]

I'd just like to say that this discussion is a thing a pure beauty. I'm sure that once you've adapted your exact theoretical model of floatstone physics to game rules, determining the thermodynamics of pyromancy will be a snap.

Thermodynamics of Pyromancy is fairly important, as it determines the energy needs of a society that has access to Pyromancy. A sufficiently good eergy exchange rate for Pyromancy makes it so that a society can boil water, cook food, and smelt metal without the need for a mundane fuel source. This in turn allows society to flourish in places that are otherwise untenable for life.

Indeed, with good enough pyromancy, you could use vent worms and other extremophiles as a food source, thereby bypassing the entire standard civilization hierarchy of needs. I mean, you could actually run standard fantasy Dwarven society. On pyromancy.

Out of curiosity, what recourse do game designers who don't learn physics have?

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'd just like to say that this discussion is a thing a pure beauty. I'm sure that once you've adapted your exact theoretical model of floatstone physics to game rules, determining the thermodynamics of pyromancy will be a snap.

Thermodynamics of Pyromancy is fairly important, as it determines the energy needs of a society that has access to Pyromancy. A sufficiently good eergy exchange rate for Pyromancy makes it so that a society can boil water, cook food, and smelt metal without the need for a mundane fuel source. This in turn allows society to flourish in places that are otherwise untenable for life.

Indeed, with good enough pyromancy, you could use vent worms and other extremophiles as a food source, thereby bypassing the entire standard civilization hierarchy of needs. I mean, you could actually run standard fantasy Dwarven society. On pyromancy.

I assume that dorfs use geothermal energy to 'actually work', although it would be pretty neat if they were mining uranium (like the drow) this whole time.

But the point is well made. Having an actual model will make the dissonance between how a pyromantic culture is said to behave (on the larger, 'fluff' scale) and how it behaves on the character level much smaller, and furthermore it allows more effective generation of cultural 'fluff'.

Out of curiosity, what recourse do game designers who don't learn physics have?

Firefocks has Crashed

and needs cuddles

Waaambulance and cute pictures aside, it's a serious question. Does good game design require that the designer is a polymath? Does it, at the very least, require that reality-modeling tasks are delegated to actual real-world experts? Should game models be derived from reasonable physical models (which aids in consistency with what players expect and with other rules), or can they be derived in an ad hoc system?

As an example, how do you think the rules for falling speed in D&D were derived? Did someone figure out the distance a person starting at rest could fall in a round, and decided that instantaneous falls were a reasonable simplifying assumption for the distances that D&D works over?

[TarkisFlux]

Catharz, I acutally got bored a while back and compared the 3.x falling rules to standard falling in physics and terminal velocity stuff.

It's not a linear approach, but people hit 50% of terminal velocity in 3 secs, 90% in 8 secs, 99% in 15 secs, etc. Terminal velocity is around 90m/s (around 1770 ft / round). If you fall from rest (off a cliff, out of plane, etc.) you're still moving a distance around 900 ft in the first round and around twice that each round after that. Falling damage is capped well below that, so any falls of larger height may as well happen over the course of a round since they don't cause any change in damage dealt.

Anyway, capping falling damage might be weird, and the way damage scales with height might be weird, but the approximation that any falls we care about happen in a round isn't bad.

[opera]

Does good game design require that the designer is a polymath? Does it, at the very least, require that reality-modeling tasks are delegated to actual real-world experts? Should game models be derived from reasonable physical models (which aids in consistency with what players expect and with other rules), or can they be derived in an ad hoc system?

While I don't have a strong opinion on reality-modeling (I personally think it should be kept to a minimum), I kind of wish game designers spent a little more time thinking about individual psychology - there's actually quite a lot of research on areas like risk perception, motivation, and cognition that I think game designers might find useful when doing their thing - for example, take research showing that people tend to value losses more than equivalent gains, that events with equivalent probabilities will evoke different responses depending on how the event is framed, or that that people tend to underestimate small probabilities and overestimate large ones; stuff like that could be potentially relevant to designing a good gaming system. In fact, the only example I think I've ever seen of doing that in game design was here, when (I think Frank?) suggested that lists should be kept to some number less than ~7 (apologies to all if I am misremembering what I've read here).

[CatharzGodfoot]

Catharz, I acutally got bored a while back and compared the 3.x falling rules to standard falling in physics and terminal velocity stuff.

...

Anyway, capping falling damage might be weird, and the way damage scales with height might be weird, but the approximation that any falls we care about happen in a round isn't bad.

So it does make for a good approximation in D&D. How do you think that approximation was arrived at?

While I don't have a strong opinion on reality-modeling (I personally think it should be kept to a minimum), I kind of wish game designers spent a little more time thinking about individual psychology - there's actually quite a lot of research on areas like risk perception, motivation, and cognition that I think game designers might find useful when doing their thing - for example, take research showing that people tend to value losses more than equivalent gains, that events with equivalent probabilities will evoke different responses depending on how the event is framed, or that that people tend to underestimate small probabilities and overestimate large ones; stuff like that could be potentially relevant to designing a good gaming system.

That's a good point. It seems as though it should be possible to encourage certain behaviors in players by using theoretical models rather than just guess and check.

To make it completely clear to others who may be reading, you're referring to the phenomenon that "losses loom larger than gains", AKA "loss aversion".

In fact, the only example I think I've ever seen of doing that in game design was here, when (I think Frank?) suggested that lists should be kept to some number less than ~7 (apologies to all if I am misremembering what I've read here).

Yeah, that was Frank. IIRC it was in relation to how many immediate in-combat options a player should have to deal with.

[RandomCasualty2]

If there's nothing magical about a god damn demigod seamonster, nevermind 40 of them, then I don't want to play your game. Beings of Herculean strength should be allowed to pick up and use mountains as weapons. Indeed, this is usually how islands are reputed to form. A god was practicing juggling one day, or bored, or had to beat the crap out of a monster with a sufficiently large landmass.

Really, I don't know what RPG you'd like if you want to have people throwing mountains. No game I know of even really supports that.

As far as magic and moving islands, basically it's a separate mechanic. you can't move an island without an ability that specifically says "you can move a floating island"

It's just like moving continents in D&D. If you have some artifact or epic spell that specifically lets you do that, you can do it. Otherwise you can't. I mean that's just the way the game works.

I don't understand why this offends you so much, especially given that no gaming system would ever let you throw a mountain anyway.

And anyway once you're on the mythological level where you toss mountains and reshape continents, you've thrown conventional physics completely out the window anyway.

[TavishArtair]

Really, I don't know what RPG you'd like if you want to have people throwing mountains. No game I know of even really supports that.

As far as magic and moving islands, basically it's a separate mechanic. you can't move an island without an ability that specifically says "you can move a floating island"

It's just like moving continents in D&D. If you have some artifact or epic spell that specifically lets you do that, you can do it. Otherwise you can't. I mean that's just the way the game works.

I don't understand why this offends you so much, especially given that no gaming system would ever let you throw a mountain anyway.

And anyway once you're on the mythological level where you toss mountains and reshape continents, you've thrown conventional physics completely out the window anyway.

On the contrary, I do play games (yes, published systems) which allow you to pick up and throw mountains and even give rules on how far you make them go based on how strong you are. And planets. I also infer from the rules they constitute an area attack... for... obvious reasons.

Although the individual game basically never features something like that (actually, moving planets is more in-genre), "a few dozen giant divine sea monsters" is certainly the kind of mythical muscle that one would expect to reshape the freaking countryside. The way you phrased basically read to me that Hercules can't hold up the sky long enough for Atlas to go ask his daughters for a few apples or whatever, which is already an annoying proposition, and then stated that you would need magic to do so, at which point I experience cognitive dissonance because Hercules (or a few dozen giant seamonsters) are made out of magic. What's the point of having magically magical magic monsters if they can't do magical things? This inspires sheer cognitive dissonance in me.

[Beth_Naught]

Is there a reference you could give that explains this situation?

RSVP pedantry party? I'm so there!

If you take a completely idealized model without drag and assume that your skyskip was created with a constant motion, never undergoing acceleration, then you're totally correct and there isn't any friction at all. But since people need to ride around on floatrock inverse hang gliders, you need a different model that can simulate moving stuff - else you can't pilot your boulder out of the junkyard.

As an aside, in the idealized model you don't have a maximum speed and that doesn't matter (falling off of a cliff doesn't hurt, even though you end up going very fast - it's that sudden acceleration at the end that twinges) and you don't need to consider friction (rubberbands break when you load them past their yield point, not because they're moving relative to anything in particular). Yield stress calculations are sufficiently narsty that engineers often substitute exact solutions with fudge and duct tape or use numerical approximations - I know which I'd choose

Of course, I'm a failed musician who fell in with a bad crowd and got hooked on mathematical logic rather than any kind of physical scientist, so take that cum grano salis (getting your recommended daily allowance of sodium builds strong blood pressure, after all).

If you really did want to calculate friction, you'd use the equation for a damped harmonic oscillator and plug in an empirically derived coefficient of friction representing force lost to plastic deformation as the dampening constant. But you probably don't. Sorry about the ill-mannered wiki-linking, especially if the article's been replaced with Cheney/Reagan yaoi. I didn't do it, honest. Probably.

Maybe you'd want to cobble together some specs on the culture and let them determine what kind of magical psuedo-technology is around? If the rulers of Suberosia want to build a funerary ziggurat, do they lash slaves to haul bricks, employ prefabricated simple machines to assist, or bid a skymage crew telekinetically loft everything into position? A stagnant culture with a distinct priestly magician caste might not even have virgilesco's cool perpetual water wheels, and a culture without a middle class probably hasn't used those water wheels to create indoor plumbing.

Then if there's been any cultural shifts lately, you get:

• Plot point! Suberosia no longer has enough active skymages to seek milder climes when the worst monsoon in a millennium wipes out all the accessible arable land. Starvation, paddy burgling, and contraband barley runners.
• Plot point! After recovering from years of plague, Suberosia has regained the critical number of skymages needed to move and can visit an earthbound city near you to conduct chamber pot bombardments if you don't acceed to their demands. High-stakes diplomacy, covert sabotage, and siege feces.

Then after you know what's reasonably in the world you can start sketching how the players can manipulate it. If I want to joyride on a floatrock inverse hang glider, do I:

• Need to be a diplomate of Skymage Unversity?
• Can I still go for a ride if I forgot my slide rule focus back at my garret?
• What if I'm just a brilliant expert on magic who's never seen SU campus?
• Or just kinda bright with a cocktail napkin scratchpad?
• Maybe if I just make a thinking face and hold my breath?

Probably option 1 or 3 works best, but the implications differ. The you'd answer the question of whether or not someone can hijack a floating island with a nail file pointed right at those elastic bands the same way.

...Unless you're seriously considering "Oh, you like this floating crud, do you? And you want your character to interact with it, ever? That means you can't, you untrustworthy git!"

[Judging__Eagle]

The thing I like about immovable objects is that it stops you from having to worry about a bunch of crap that comes from trying to use real physics.

Holy shit, you're right. We could also simplify things by making all quest-important NPCs invulnerable and make the cursors urn red when they move over enemies.

-Username17

Code: Select all

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Select "Frank Trollman" (CZ014MDS05)
Set Essential
"Frank Trollman" has now been set to Essential
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Hmmm.... that could work. Could. The probability is low though. Lulz, probability.

[RandomCasualty2]

What's the point of having magically magical magic monsters if they can't do magical things? This inspires sheer cognitive dissonance in me.

There's a difference between magic and mythic. You seem to want mythic abilities as opposed to magical ones. Conjuring a fireball or a mystical light is simply magical. Blowing up a mountain or throwing a planet at someone is mythic.

It's very hard to write a mythic system that doesn't just devolve into magic tea party, because characters have abilities that are so high that it's very difficult to actually measure them meaningfully. The other problem is that mythic characters tend to have widely variable abilities. In one myth hercules holds up the world, in another, he may have trouble with lifting some large boulder.

And once you've gotten to that level, you don't really have rules, so much as variable guidelines. Hercules doesn't have a given lifting capacity of 350,432 lbs and when he tries to lift the world you get out your scientific calculator and figure out the mass versus his lifting capability. At that point it's basically all arbitrary and relative weights anyway, and conventional science isn't even a factor.

Now, maybe if you expect the game to constantly involve people throwing planets and lifting continents, then it might be necessary to define that stuff, but given that I've never actually seen that shit happen in any RPG I've played (including super hero RPGs)... I really don't feel its necessary for most games.

[JonSetanta]

Really, I don't know what RPG you'd like if you want to have people throwing mountains. No game I know of even really supports that.

OHOHOHOHO

OHOHO

OHOHOHOHOHOOOOHOHOHO

Mutants & Masterminds

[angelfromanotherpin]

Really, I don't know what RPG you'd like if you want to have people throwing mountains. No game I know of even really supports that.

Nobilis.

[Username17]

Anyway, Thermodynamics. It's pretty important, because energy is the source and the limiter of civilization. Literally everything that society does is because of energy. Everything that makes life better than just lying in the middle of a forest costs energy. Surviving day to day costs energy. Industrial society is possible because of the ability to liberate energy stored in coal and oil has many times increased the possible output of a man.

And energy can be transformed from one state to another. At a cost certainly, but it can be. While we can't eat coal (our day to day lives require sustenance in the form of chemical energy from a rather limited set of potential sources), we can burn coal to heat nitrogen to rapidly fix it on catalysts to make ammonia to fertilize plants to vastly increase their yield and eat the resulting products. So if you give a culture access to a non-standard energy source, you should think in terms of how it will transform and propel society.

If human labor can conjure fire that is in excess of the amount of energy that they physically expend to go through the motions of calling it - you're god damn right that changes the equation. While not "free" in the sense that the energy output is finite with respect to the amount of labor you put in to collecting it, such an energy source is free in the sense that it may in fact be limitlessly renewable (at least within the context of many generations of people - if pyromancy summons fire from some star or another you will literally never ever run out of juice before the planet finally falls into the sun).

That has profound effects on population density equations. After all, if each human is a net energy gain to society, then society is at its most efficient and cleanest when people are as densely packed as possible. Wrap your mind around that one for a while.

-Username17

[MartinHarper]

That has profound effects on population density equations. After all, if each human is a net energy gain to society, then society is at its most efficient and cleanest when people are as densely packed as possible. Wrap your mind around that one for a while

Isn't that already the case? For example, folks who live in cities have better public transport than folks who live in the countryside, and have to travel less distance to get places.

[Heath Robinson]

Isn't that already the case? For example, folks who live in cities have better public transport than folks who live in the countryside, and have to travel less distance to get places.

Not just travel smaller distances, but use more efficient means to do so. The elevator is one of the most efficient means of travel available to modern man. You don't find them in the countryside.

[Username17]

Sort of. Modern industrial society can pull a number of magic tricks that people in that society have now become accustomed to and will use whether or not it makes any sense. Industrialism can bring you fruit out of season, allow you to live and work in different places, give you a home distinct from that of your family while still being able to visit at least on major holidays. And these are frankly ridiculous and unsustainable. But there is a package deal for location. Transporting a hundred tonnes of bananas from the tropics to the temperate winter isn't much more preposterous than transporting fifty tonnes.

Basically, modern society has patently ridiculous ideas about what travel should be done, and as a direct result its impact lowers when you make industrial cities more compact. But that's a relatively recent development. A hundred years ago people didn't have the expectation that they would should be able to easily go to every single event in their city, so they just didn't go. And because of the absurd travel demands that industrial citizens place upon their environment, literal shrinking of potential travel distances makes modern cities cleaner because people will travel them anyway. In older ages, and by that I mean literally every bygone era, the reverse was true. Increasing distances made travel not happen, and put a lower and more distributed strain on the environment.

The point is that people who have the power to essentially create net energy with mere time expenditure would essentially be in the same boat as modernity even though they aren't living in a modern world in any meaningful sense. The more such a society specializes, the less the people need to rely upon external inputs and thus the less strain they would put on their environment. Enough pyromancers in a small enough space and their entire society could be self contained - a literal microcosm where the entire society's energy needs in all forms were provided by specialists performing various kinds of energy conversion.

Seriously, treating sewage isn't that hard to wrap one's mid around when water can be boiled and condensed by force of will.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

I suppose the next question is, is this a bad thing? Should we go around attempting to enforce a certain minimum space for a pyromancer?

[MartinHarper]

I suppose the next question is, is this a bad thing? Should we go around attempting to enforce a certain minimum space for a pyromancer?

I would say, good thing. If I'm playing a Fire Wizard, I want his central heating system to be powered by Fire Magic, not coal. Provided Pyromancy is restricted to a single culture (like floatstones) it's entirely reasonable for that culture to have excellent sanitation, a great rail network, and steam-powered farming machinery.

[RandomCasualty2]

Really, I don't know what RPG you'd like if you want to have people throwing mountains. No game I know of even really supports that.

Nobilis.

Never played that one.

I'm curious as to how the mechanics work out such that it's not totally crazy.

[Heath Robinson]

Never played that one.

I'm curious as to how the mechanics work out such that it's not totally crazy.

Very limited resources. Throwing mountains would be an Aspect 8+ miracle (depending on what you're throwing the mountain at). You will have a limited number of shots at throwing a mountain and you lost some of the cooler things to get that.

I mean, throwing a mountain against some of the Domain miracles is weaksauce. Nobilis takes some thinking to get really awe inspiring Domain miracles, but the basic examples with Fire would be an 8 dot miracle would be rendering all Nazis unburnable, forever.

Most of this is balanced by the fact that miracles don't affect other Nobilis directly. And the fact that you burnt tons of miracle points, and the other Nobilis are going to be pissed. Nobilis is very much a socially balanced game. Like Continuum, really.

Then there's also the fact that the mortals are going to notice, and that's been considered bad for a very long time. You might be able to get away from the other Nobilis, but Lord Entropy would file some paperwork and get your special powers revoked, if he didn't want to see you tortured first.

Interesting fact: insect bites are one of the hardest things in Nobilis to become immune to. There's a reason it's called the Locust court.