The Gaming Den

BearsAreBrown wrote:

hogarth wrote:If Superman is boring when he punches Gorilla Grodd five times in a row, it wouldn't particularly make him more interesting if he switched to "punch, heat vision, heat vision, super breath, punch".

Then when is Superman ever interesting?

Possibly never, depending on your tastes in heroes. But I think the general idea is that the nature of the challenge he faces (whether it's an ethical dilemma, or a "Superman-proof" villain, or something targetting his Achilles heel) should make the challenge interesting rather than which particular powers he uses (and in which order) to overcome it.

hogarth wrote:If Superman is boring when he punches Gorilla Grodd five times in a row, it wouldn't particularly make him more interesting if he switched to "punch, heat vision, heat vision, super breath, punch".

Says who? Forgetting the fact that you can model a punch many different ways (see Street Fighter), it's more interesting because it's more unpredictable. If all Superman could do is punch then we could guess how he overcomes the fight without even reading it--like we do with Cyclops. Hell, just the order in which he does these things can model a different visual spectacle and some will be more interesting than others. Again, see Street Fighter. Watching Superman fight can still be boring for a variety of reasons (he outclasses his teammates and opponents too much, we're so familiar with his moveset that even a weird permutation of his moves fail to surprise us, the plot requires his powers to fail at an arbitrary time, etc..) but Superman mixing up his moves will all things being equal be more interesting than just him spamming the 'punch' button.

But I think the general idea is that the nature of the challenge he faces (whether it's an ethical dilemma, or a "Superman-proof" villain, or something targetting his Achilles heel) should make the challenge interesting rather than which particular powers he uses (and in which order) to overcome it.

A DM can't tailor challenges enough so that they'll be interesting no matter what the approach. It's possible to do it now and then, but as a matter of course? It's just too much effort and time. Especially in the context of combat there's just too much to model to ask a DM to do this every time--which is why a big goal of monster manuals is to make any set of encounters at least mildly interesting without the DM having to scrutinize every set. '10 cyborgs from outer space' has to be as interesting of a generic challenge as 'Livewire and Parasite team up'.

Thus a lot of the onus on making a particular encounter interesting will have to come from the players and they can only do that by having a robust enough toolbox so that worth spending time to explore that aspect of the story. And a big part of that toolbox is interesting powers. Colossus is simply not going to make encounters as interesting and dynamic as Iron Man or even Batman.

I think most comic fans enjoy seeing their hero kicking ass in new and exotic ways that are plausible for their character.

The reason you have interesting challenges is so that superman does more than punches something in the face. The challenge is almost a macguffin. It doesn't matter *what* it is, so long as it means that Superman doesn't punch it in the face and win.

Plus, what Lago said is pretty spot on. It's difficult to construct a meaningful combat for one person, to do it for 4 or 5 people every single combat is painful. In each adventure I run I usually try to spotlight each character in some kind of fight or big way so that everyone has an "I'm badass" moment, but to do that in every goddamn encounter would take forever to write.

TheFlatline wrote:The reason you have interesting challenges is so that superman does more than punches something in the face. The challenge is almost a macguffin. It doesn't matter *what* it is, so long as it means that Superman doesn't punch it in the face and win.

Agreed 100%. Is that supposed to be an argument in favour of the randomness in Winds of Fate or against it?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

hogarth wrote:If Superman is boring when he punches Gorilla Grodd five times in a row, it wouldn't particularly make him more interesting if he switched to "punch, heat vision, heat vision, super breath, punch".

Says who? Forgetting the fact that you can model a punch many different ways (see Street Fighter), it's more interesting because it's more unpredictable.

It could be unpredictably interesting or unpredictably stupid, depending on the circumstances (e.g. Green Arrow has to punch down a wall with boxing glove arrows because he never rolls the right number to get his acid arrow or explosive arrow). Of course, you can come up with a subsystem that allows you to ignore the randomness and skip right to the result you want, but that means that you're getting a positive result despite the random aspect rather than because of it.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:A DM can't tailor challenges enough so that they'll be interesting no matter what the approach. It's possible to do it now and then, but as a matter of course? It's just too much effort and time.

I think this is where I have the greatest philosophical difference with the Winds of Fate concept: I think it's totally fine to have one power you use 85% of the time, one you use 10% of the time, and one you use 5% of the time (say), as long as the choice to use A, B, or C is an interesting choice (and not just "use fire against ice dragon, use ice against fire dragon", for instance). For example, if a PC has the chance to bull rush an enemy off a cliff, that's an interesting thing to do, when used sparingly. It shouldn't be left up to chance for the PC to be able to choose that option when the situation arises, or conversely, to have that wasting a slot in the Winds of Fate table when the situation doesn't arise.

hogarth wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:A DM can't tailor challenges enough so that they'll be interesting no matter what the approach. It's possible to do it now and then, but as a matter of course? It's just too much effort and time.

I think this is where I have the greatest philosophical difference with the Winds of Fate concept: I think it's totally fine to have one power you use 85% of the time, one you use 10% of the time, and one you use 5% of the time (say), as long as the choice to use A, B, or C is an interesting choice (and not just "use fire against ice dragon, use ice against fire dragon", for instance). For example, if a PC has the chance to bull rush an enemy off a cliff, that's an interesting thing to do, when used sparingly. It shouldn't be left up to chance for the PC to be able to choose that option when the situation arises, or conversely, to have that wasting a slot in the Winds of Fate table when the situation doesn't arise.

That is where you and I part company. I would be horrendously offended if there were actually only 3 things my character could do in combat. Ad I'd be even more offended if one of them was used 85% of the time.

The point of a WoF system is that even if you only have 3 options a turn and there is one option that you'll use 85% of the time, it's a different choice of 3 each turn. So even if 85% of the time you'll use an "A" power, you still have five or six different A powers, so what your character does is going to be somewhat different round by round.

You still make choices, but you aren't forced into the option paralysis of sifting through 18 powers per turn, nor are you forced into the descriptive miasma of making one of three different announcements turn in and turn out forever.

-Username17

How does WoF work with noncombat abilities? I assume you can just do things at will?

BearsAreBrown wrote:How does WoF work with noncombat abilities? I assume you can just do things at will?

It depends. If you're using your combat abilities out of combat, you probably just do them. You assume that you cycle until you get th right shaped fire blast to take out the door and then you do it. But it's entirely possible to have a WoF that works on a larger scale for campaign abilities. You could roll dice and compare to charts or draw cards to see what options you have with your research, your enchantments, and the agents from the thieve's guild you run, for example. Lots of games work that way.

WoF doesn't necessarily mean that you specifically roll or draw every combat round. It means that you use the random element as a resource management system.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: You still make choices, but you aren't forced into the option paralysis of sifting through 18 powers per turn, nor are you forced into the descriptive miasma of making one of three different announcements turn in and turn out forever.

The idea of having a level 1 D&D fighter (say) with 18 equally useful powers is interesting, but I'll believe it when I see it. And I'm not talking about the 4E approach where 17 of your 18 powers are "poke your enemy with a weapon: do [W] damage and shift the enemy one square" or "poke your enemy with a weapon in a slightly different way: do [W] damage and enemy gets a -1 penalty until next turn".

hogarth wrote:The idea of having a level 1 D&D fighter (say) with 18 equally useful powers is interesting, but I'll believe it when I see it. And I'm not talking about the 4E approach where 17 of your 18 powers are "poke your enemy with a weapon: do [W] damage and shift the enemy one square" or "poke your enemy with a weapon in a slightly different way: do [W] damage and enemy gets a -1 penalty until next turn".

It's probably easier when they're all modifications on Frank's RAL actions. There are a lot of ways that one can model "charge into enemy territory."

hogarth wrote: The idea of having a level 1 D&D fighter (say) with 18 equally useful powers is interesting, but I'll believe it when I see it. And I'm not talking about the 4E approach where 17 of your 18 powers are "poke your enemy with a weapon: do [W] damage and shift the enemy one square" or "poke your enemy with a weapon in a slightly different way: do [W] damage and enemy gets a -1 penalty until next turn".

1) I disagree with Frank somewhat on what should be the size of a low-level WoF matrix. I think giving new players more than 3 distinct generically-equal choices per combat turn is going to introduce option paralysis anyway. I've seen it happen in 4E D&D even. Or it might not; WoW is practically mainstream these days. I'd say that players should start out with a 2x3 or a 3x3 matrix.

2) Going with 2, that's precisely why Vanilla Action Heroes like the fighter and his dumbass worthless friends should cease to exist after a certain level. After an afternoon's worth of work I can come up with a list of 30 distinct martial non-weeaboo maneuvers. I don't think I could come up with 100 of them nor even 3 distinct high-level martial maneuvers.

It's not hard coming up with a nice list of suitable high-level swordmage, warblade, druid, psion, artificer, wizard, paladin, etc.. powers though that at least in fluff perform and feel superior to low-level ones though. Meaning that the problem lies with that worthless bitch.

I think giving new players more than 3 distinct generically-equal choices per combat turn is going to introduce option paralysis anyway. I've seen it happen in 4E D&D even. Or it might not; WoW is practically mainstream these days. I'd say that players should start out with a 2x3 or a 3x3 matrix.

Bolding mine. The problem with this is that not only new players play 1st level characters. Lots of DMs like to start their campaigns at 1st level (for power-level reasons, often), and I get pretty fucking bored of having minimal choices because the designers stupidly assumed that only newbies would be in this position. 4E does this, for example. And conversely, new players sometimes play higher-level characters. Because if a new players joins your campaign, what are you supposed to do? Make them a useless henchman? Make everyone restart at 1st level? Fuck that.

So sure, make a smaller matrix for new players. But don't tie it to level. Just say that a "basic" matrix is 2x2 or whatever, and that players can expand/customize it out to NxM, where those numbers are big enough to not be boring.

hogarth wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: You still make choices, but you aren't forced into the option paralysis of sifting through 18 powers per turn, nor are you forced into the descriptive miasma of making one of three different announcements turn in and turn out forever.

The idea of having a level 1 D&D fighter (say) with 18 equally useful powers is interesting, but I'll believe it when I see it. And I'm not talking about the 4E approach where 17 of your 18 powers are "poke your enemy with a weapon: do [W] damage and shift the enemy one square" or "poke your enemy with a weapon in a slightly different way: do [W] damage and enemy gets a -1 penalty until next turn".

You're assuming that the WoF matrix is static throughout a character's career. It doesn't have to be. At level 1 it can be a 4x3 matrix, where you roll a D4 and get your choice of 3 moves. At level 20 you might be looking at a 10x6 matrix or something similar.

And with a WoF matrix, you can throw in a more powerful alpha-level move at first level and not always see it come up.

As far as the MacGuffin comment, my point was that the important part is not that an individual enemy makes superman do something other than punch, it's that superman does something other than punching. The enemy is a macguffin. I mean, you could take away superman's strength, you could use kryptonite, you could have an enemy be immune to his punches, you could have superman suddenly decide to become anti-punching, you could just have superman *forget* to punch at that one particular moment.

It doesn't matter what makes you do something other than punch. The interesting part is when you throw punching out as a viable option and have to contend with his other powers when punching may have been easier to do.

And that's what WoF does. For whatever reason, your options are not always available to you.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: 1) I disagree with Frank somewhat on what should be the size of a low-level WoF matrix. I think giving new players more than 3 distinct generically-equal choices per combat turn is going to introduce option paralysis anyway. I've seen it happen in 4E D&D even. Or it might not; WoW is practically mainstream these days. I'd say that players should start out with a 2x3 or a 3x3 matrix.

Whether I'm choosing from 9 moves or 18 moves, it doesn't matter. If I'm playing Swordy the Swordsman, I want to pick some variation on "I hit the bad guy with my sword" about 85% of the time. Whether that sword move is called "Blue Steel Strike" or "Le Tigre Chop" or "Ferrari Thrust" or "Magnum Slash" is of secondary importance; if one is noticeably worse than the others, I'll try to avoid that one, but if they're all about the same, choosing between them isn't particularly interesting.

That's not an issue with WoF though, that's a product of uninspired and shitty development.

BearsAreBrown wrote:That's not an issue with WoF though, that's a product of uninspired and shitty development.

I agree. The actual "make a random roll" part of Winds of Fate is the easy and not terribly interesting part. Making a big list of powers that you'd be happy to pick randomly out of a hat is much, much more difficult. That's why saying "Assuming that we have a great list of powers, here's how we form them into a random table" seems completely ass-backwards to me, as I noted earlier:

hogarth wrote:Now you could say "My Winds of Fate system is going to be so great that A, B and C are equally awesome all the time", but designing separate-but-equally-useful powers is the tricky part and it has nothing to do with Winds of Fate.

What if each position in the column confered a particular bonus to the action placed in that slot? Say you're a Fire Mage. The slots in the column might be something like Defense // Area of Effect // Counter // Ranged // Buff.

Then your powers could be something like Fire (LVL appropriate Damage). You slot that into the Defense area, and it becomes Damage Reduction (Fire) up to X damage. Slot it into AoE and it gets a range and radius. Slot it into Counter, and when you're attacked you can make a fire-based attack when you're attacked, maybe lower damage, plus additional Defense? Ranged gives it a single target, long range attack, or slot it in Buff and give your ally(allies?) + Fire damage on melee or ranged attacks.

Would that make things more interesting?

hogarth wrote: I agree. The actual "make a random roll" part of Winds of Fate is the easy and not terribly interesting part. Making a big list of powers that you'd be happy to pick randomly out of a hat is much, much more difficult. That's why saying "Assuming that we have a great list of powers, here's how we form them into a random table" seems completely ass-backwards to me

The WoF stands in instead of charges, cool-down times, or mana points. And yes, you have to nail down how resource management works before you can write powers.

WoF produces the net effect of cool-down times: You use a series of different, but appropriate abilities out of your longish total list. But on a round by round basis it produces less option paralysis (because each turn your number of options is a manageable number), and it requires less micromanagement (because on turn 5 of the combat you aren't tracking cool-down numbers of 4 other powers), and it presents different move orders battle to battle so it feels less like "five moves of doom". And frankly, I think that unless you also flip out at people that they have no right to discuss the merits of cool-down-times or charges before they write two hundred pages of abilities, that you're being disingenuous.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: WoF produces the net effect of cool-down times: You use a series of different, but appropriate abilities out of your longish total list. But on a round by round basis it produces less option paralysis (because each turn your number of options is a manageable number), and it requires less micromanagement (because on turn 5 of the combat you aren't tracking cool-down numbers of 4 other powers), and it presents different move orders battle to battle so it feels less like "five moves of doom".

Understood, although in a cooldown system you usually have each ability usable on demand at least one time, whereas in the Winds of Fate system you have to wait until it's rolled, I think (i.e. there's a random "warmup" time as well).

Your point about eliminating the "five moves of doom" only applies if you know you have more than five Winds of Fate moves that you're interested in using. That's unknowable in the current discussion.

FrankTrollman wrote:And frankly, I think that unless you also flip out at people that they have no right to discuss the merits of cool-down-times or charges before they write two hundred pages of abilities, that you're being disingenuous.

Huh? I've seen plenty of games that have used cooldown times and charges with moderate success. The only example I can think of where a "Winds of Fate"-like system is used is the Crusader from the Tome of Battle, and it wasn't my cup of tea; I certainly didn't think it was any better than the Warblade's way of using maneuvers, for instance.

hogarth wrote:Your point about eliminating the "five moves of doom" only applies if you know you have more than five Winds of Fate moves that you're interested in using. That's unknowable in the current discussion.

Depends on how you construct the WoF matrix. This is a problem with tiered power systems (e.g. roll 1d6, you get to use any manuever of that level or lower; level 1 has magic missile in it, level 6 has cloudkill in it) but it's not a problem with Green Arrow style systems where level 1 has Boxing Glove Arrow, Glue Arrow, Net Arrow, and Armor Piercing arrow, level 2 has Bee Arrow, Homing Arrow, Ice Arrow, and Buzzsaw Arrow, level 3 has Explosive Arrow, Grapping Hook Arrow, Triple Arrow, and Oil Arrow.

Secondly, sometimes you will roll results that don't have anything you want (because the manuever just perfect for this tactical sitation is in another row). Let me tell you that's just part of the game. Of course people have also proposed having an Edge or Fate system where you can specifically choose a result you want in a pinch situation.

Thirdly, you'll have to design powers so that you don't have an obvious superior choice anyway, that way when someone rolls a 2 they don't always spam 'lightning barrage'. Of course this is a problem for every system and at least WoF mitigates it somewhat.

hogarth wrote:Huh? I've seen plenty of games that have used cooldown times and charges with moderate success. The only example I can think of where a "Winds of Fate"-like system is used is the Crusader from the Tome of Battle, and it wasn't my cup of tea; I certainly didn't think it was any better than the Warblade's way of using maneuvers, for instance.

We could write several threads on why the Crusader isn't interesting and sucks. Some highlights though:

A) Just because the Crusader's power scheme is better doesn't mean that he's more effective. WoF doesn't in any case guarantee that a character will be more powerful than one using Spell Charges or Mana Points or whatever; quite frankly it'll be the opposite, because reliability and ability combinations are more powerful in 3E D&D. And because non-spellcasters are already eating a shit sandwich the Crusader loses enough objective power that they're not fn to play.

B) The Crusader has a laughably tiny list of powers to pick from to begin with. At level friggin' 19, they can ready 6 manuevers. They of course can also pick expansion options that hand out more readied manuevers at once. Meaning that the randomness is so small that it doesn't produce enough unpredictability to be exciting, just enough to be annoying. It's like playing a lottery where you have a 95% chance of winning but a ticket costs 2 dollars and the payout is 2 dollars and 5 cents.

C) The Warblade and Swordsage have more choice anyway. The point of WoF is to neem down your options to something manageable, but because the Crusader already goes way below the 'manageable choice' point and the Warblade and Swordsage don't, the latter two have all of the joys of choice without the problem of option paralysis.

D) The Warblade and Swordsage have a lot bigger list of manuevers to choose from. The Warblade has 5 schools. The Swordsage 6. The Crusader has 3. And two of the schools, Devoted Spirit and Stone Dragon, are total turkeys.

E) The PrC and multiclass system strongly favors the Warblade and Swordsage. The number of available manuevers don't go up for Crusaders; even if they took 5 levels in Master of Nine, they would only be able to start out with 2 readied manuevers (out of 9). The Warblade and Swordsage would have them all immediately.

F) The manuever system itself is kind of pants. 80% of the manuevers in the book are a flat-out waste of time. There really is no option paralysis to be had because the actual amount of credible choice you can make is really small.

WoF for the most part feels like a bad idea. I can understand you may want to mix things up for variety, and in a computer game, this can be good. Tabletop wise, it'll just be slowing things down.

You're better off just using one mechanic to represent a variety of different attacks rather than having a separate mechanic for each. If your ice bolt and your fire bolt both just do damage, then you can have one universal bolt power where you can choose a damage type. There's no need to treat a kick, a jab or an uppercut differently, you can all just call that one attack.

The only real reason for WoF that I'm seeing is that people want to make kick slightly better than jab, and the only reason anyone ever uses jab is because they can't kick. It's overly complex and not necessary. If the abilities aren't going to have two distinct strategic uses, then just merge them.

You want super moves, but they should be using some kind of charge-up or limited resource, not just a random die roll.

I am not even going to directly address your tirade about how variety for the sake of variety is bad, because that is fucking insane. I'm going to move on to your actual numeric argument, because that is something I can engage with at all.

Swordslinger wrote: You want super moves, but they should be using some kind of charge-up or limited resource, not just a random die roll.

What? A WoF result is a charge-up. It's a random charge-up, but so is Dragon Breath (in every edition of D&D). You're just rolling a die every turn you might want to breathe fire instead of trying to count the number of turns that have passed. You get the same average result, you just have much easier book keeping.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:I am not even going to directly address your tirade about how variety for the sake of variety is bad, because that is fucking insane.

Meaningless variety is stupid. It's complexity just for the sake of complexity. If you want to have different moves that function differently, then fine. If you're just doing it so you can claim you have 22 different options when 10 of them are the same thing, that's just plain stupid. Whether some are slightly inferior to each other or they're all the same, writing melee basic attack 10 times with different names is a terrible idea for bad game designers. You're much better off using a single melee basic attack mechanic and letting people flavor it how they want to.

But if you think it's "fucking insane" to make people in an RPG use their imagination and describe their attacks, I don't even know what to say.

Swordslinger wrote: What? A WoF result is a charge-up. It's a random charge-up, but so is Dragon Breath (in every edition of D&D). You're just rolling a die every turn you might want to breathe fire instead of trying to count the number of turns that have passed. You get the same average result, you just have much easier book keeping.

No it's not. Charge-up is your basic limit gauge. You have to do something to get it up there and after you expend it, you have to charge it again. WoF is neither a charge-up nor a cooldown effect. It's just a deck of cards and entirely random. Sometimes you draw supernova every turn, other times you're limited to your weakest attack for no reason.

It's like... you wonder, why don't we just have a damage roll and roll randomly to see how much damage our attacks deal? Oh wait, we already do. WoF adds a meta-damage roll to see which dice we use to roll the actual damage roll.

WoF is a losers design philosophy. It's saying "I can't balance the game and its choices, so I'm just going to limit your choices via random roll, so you don't spam the uber move I created every turn."

How about just not designing that uber move in the first place and giving people actual tactical choices?

What's so fucking hard about having playtesters and going by the following design paradigm.

Everyone takes X -> Nerf X
Nobody takes X -> Buff X

That's not terribly difficult.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: F) The manuever system itself is kind of pants. 80% of the manuevers in the book are a flat-out waste of time. There really is no option paralysis to be had because the actual amount of credible choice you can make is really small.

...and now we circle back to the comment I keep making: Improving the set of available maneuvers would be way, way more valuable in terms of adding variety than adding more randomness (which adds very little and could even subtract from overall enjoyment).

Swordslinger wrote: It's like... you wonder, why don't we just have a damage roll and roll randomly to see how much damage our attacks deal? Oh wait, we already do. WoF adds a meta-damage roll to see which dice we use to roll the actual damage roll.

And this is the case is if you, say, adds WoF to 4e powers. But would you really argue that Yugioh is rolling metadamage rolls against the opponents life points? Because it's a WoF system.