The Gaming Den

deaddmwalking wrote:

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Fundamentally as much as you people may scoff: That's why we play these games at all.

If I want to play a Tabletop game its because the game is ultimately flexible.

I have to agree with Kaelik here. I was working on a reply, but work got in the way. Flexibility is great. There are always going to be situations where the physics engine breaks down and the table is going to have to figure out how to proceed. But if the following table produces better outputs than your game system, your game system is a misnomer:

Roll a d20:
15+ You succeed
11-14 Argue with your DM for success
6-11 You fail, unless you can create a convincing reason otherwise
1-5 You fail, full stop.

Esp. as that table contradicts itself when you roll an 11.

I wasn't replying to the PG 42 for blugs sake. I meant fundamentally I as an individual get to choose if the task at hand is better suited to Job Proficiency: Animal tender or Job Proficiency: Sheepherder.

On one hand, I don't think Official Bitch Threads are that great, since they waste energy on negativity. And yes there is such a thing as too much negativity, even on the Gaming Den. On the other hand, Pathfinder 2 really warrants a drubbing, if just for our sanity, and everyone has clearly announced their intention to not. So in the community spirit, I think people should cooperate in verbally abusing the system.

So here's their latest post. It's about magic.

http://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dy ... out-Spells

First impressions: "Oh, healing is Necromancy now? So we're back to 2e?" and "...wow, spell points. I'm sure that won't be confusing at all in a system that also has spell slots and also features alternate casting systems. Repeatedly."

Changing Cure Wounds from Necromancy to Conjuration while leaving Inflict Wounds as still being Necromancy was one of the few things 3e did wrong when modifying 2e. The other defensible option for what the two spell lines should both be (Evocations) would require changing more spells than just making healing a subschool of Necromancy again.

I like that they're bringing rituals a la 4e and that mundanes can use them too. Having somebody else in the party being able to fix the dead cleric after battle ends is good.

Almaz wrote: I'm sure that won't be confusing at all in a system that also has spell slots and also features alternate casting systems. Repeatedly."

Actually the point is precisely simplifying things by standardizing all the secondary resources magic classes got like domain powers and bloodlines and all that noise.

Besides Pathfinder itself never really supported alternate casting systems. There are no official Pathfinder psionics/invocations/incarnum/etc, you only have 3rd party versions of those.

To be clear, I have no real objections to the use of necromancy for healing. I'm just actually genuinely surprised they made a sensible change.

And I'm still going to object to calling "the resource we're using now that has nothing to do with spells per se but does power a variety of abilities, which SOMETIMES involves changing a spell" as spell points. There's power in naming something, and there's also power in giving it a stupid, wrong name which has partial overlap with "a term we actually use in our actual casting system."

I also notice they haven't actually described anything about the ritual system in a meaningful sense, except that they've added a critical failure chance, so now casting using spells is going to be even more important when it's actually a risk, which is also the times when it's most useful to have another resurrector in the party. Because who wants to be the one to make a party-wipe when they tried to raise someone while they're a man down and instead killed everyone? Great design, folks.

Pathfinder 2 devblog wrote:For instance, if you critically fail planar binding, you call something dark and horrible that isn't bound by your wards, and it immediately attempts to destroy you!

The concept of "spell points" as they described them isn't horrible. The name is irredeemable and needs to change.

In our homebrew, we use a form of currency that powers spells and many class abilities (including powering some feats). We call it 'mana'.

I've been learning French and the word for 'gasoline' is 'essence', which I like without regard to that also being the term used in Shadowrun.

Again I think it's better to whip Paizo for its deserved failures and not its overall minor quibbles.

Spell Points is a bad name, can and should be changed, but overall solid idea.

Almaz wrote:Because who wants to be the one to make a party-wipe when they tried to raise someone while they're a man down and instead killed everyone?

"I'm going to ressurect the cleric, everybody else go take cover behind those far away rocks!"

Actually I'd go with "Ok I'm going to try to rez the cleric, if he starts trying to eat my face, stab the hell out of him."

"Safety warning: securely restrain corpse before trying to use Ressurection Ritual TM. If accidental zombification occurs, apply blunt force until it stops moving, then use Ressurection Ritual TM again."

It does seem like the kind of "genre appropriate" resurrection failures that are actually completely undone by the fact that the characters are genre savvy and have their actions determined by co-authors who are invested in them not dying. So while we can all think of works in the genre from Wizard of Earthsea to Full Metal Alchemist where trying to bring someone back from the dead doesn't work out right and that becomes the focus of the story for a while, there's no particular reason to believe the other co-authors in a co-operative storytelling endeavor are going to go along with this when the character being brought back from the dead is the self-insert character of one of the co-authors.

It's a terrible failure to understand, not the genre, but the medium. The player characters are going to chain up the Cleric's corpse and have characters who aren't ranting out the ritual stand around with readied attacks. Because fucking obviously they are going to do that. The chances of the players deciding to passively allow their characters to become the victim-protagonists in a weird fiction horror scenario is fairly close to zero. And writing earnestly about the possibility displays a shocking lack of understanding about how Dungeons & Dragons works.

-Username17

maglag wrote:

Almaz wrote:Because who wants to be the one to make a party-wipe when they tried to raise someone while they're a man down and instead killed everyone?

"I'm going to ressurect the cleric, everybody else go take cover behind those far away rocks!"

When making a cardboard bail, I shout the same thing.
Small chance the chains will break and hit somebody, but you never know.

deaddmwalking wrote: I have to agree with Kaelik here. I was working on a reply, but work got in the way. Flexibility is great. There are always going to be situations where the physics engine breaks down and the table is going to have to figure out how to proceed. But if the following table produces better outputs than your game system, your game system is a misnomer:

Roll a d20:
15+ You succeed
11-14 Argue with your DM for success
6-11 You fail, unless you can create a convincing reason otherwise
1-5 You fail, full stop.

Having something like that as the 'resolve any problems undefined in the rules' is certainly okay. Having that as your 'game' isn't the worst thing - it's still better than percentile roll under 90% of the time, but you can have it for free. If the rules don't provide anything better than that, why are they even there? They're just getting in the way.

It's not like that's a particularly high standard. Rules should be better than Magic-Tea-Party. If they're not, then they won't be used, and they don't belong. If your rules are magic-tea-party but you're rolling dice for the simple sake of obfuscation, you can save a lot of complexity by just making it Magic-Tea-Party.

And nothing about that reduces flexibility or limits creativity.

I guess I'm not really picking up what you're laying down here. I mean, what you describe sounds like a pretty low bar. The Omega System has pretty much the same task resolution you describe, but wins by virtue of okyer investment affecting the outcome.

I'm having trouble decyphering exactly what you mean by "outputs". What games have worse outputs magical tea party?

Hiram McDaniels wrote:

deaddmwalking wrote: I have to agree with Kaelik here. I was working on a reply, but work got in the way. Flexibility is great. There are always going to be situations where the physics engine breaks down and the table is going to have to figure out how to proceed. But if the following table produces better outputs than your game system, your game system is a misnomer:

Roll a d20:
15+ You succeed
11-14 Argue with your DM for success
6-11 You fail, unless you can create a convincing reason otherwise
1-5 You fail, full stop.

Having something like that as the 'resolve any problems undefined in the rules' is certainly okay. Having that as your 'game' isn't the worst thing - it's still better than percentile roll under 90% of the time, but you can have it for free. If the rules don't provide anything better than that, why are they even there? They're just getting in the way.

It's not like that's a particularly high standard. Rules should be better than Magic-Tea-Party. If they're not, then they won't be used, and they don't belong. If your rules are magic-tea-party but you're rolling dice for the simple sake of obfuscation, you can save a lot of complexity by just making it Magic-Tea-Party.

And nothing about that reduces flexibility or limits creativity.

I guess I'm not really picking up what you're laying down here. I mean, what you describe sounds like a pretty low bar. The Omega System has pretty much the same task resolution you describe, but wins by virtue of okyer investment affecting the outcome.

I'm having trouble decyphering exactly what you mean by "outputs". What games have worse outputs magical tea party?

FATAL infamously has worse mechanical outputs than magical tea party even ignoring the horrible fluff and even if you're determining good outputs by how well they support the horrible fluff.

Omegonthesane wrote:
I'm having trouble decyphering exactly what you mean by "outputs". What games have worse outputs magical tea party?
FATAL infamously has worse mechanical outputs than magical tea party even ignoring the horrible fluff and even if you're determining good outputs by how well they support the horrible fluff.

I’m trying to figure out exactly what people here mean by output. I’m assuming it means something like a result. So if input refers to the die roll, then output is success/fail.

What I’m wondering is what a bad output looks like, and what a good output entails.

I admit I’m not very familiar with fatales core mechanic, as I noted out after anal circumference.

Usually, you, as the player, want to know whether something is likely to succeed or fail. You'll usually want to choose an action based on what is most likely to succeed and accomplish what you want. For example, if you want to go to the moon you could try jumping or teleport. Before you decide, you want to know whether either action COULD succeed, and which action will be MOST LIKELY to succeed.

In MTP, you're going to discuss with the GM and arrive at a (generally) mutual understanding.

If there is a system and it allows you to jump to the moon once out of every 400 attempts, you might say that the system is producing 'undesirable' outputs - the resolution of the action is WORSE than MTP.

I'd posit that d100 roll under is USUALLY worse than MTP. Badass Space Marines who are the ultimate warriors in the galaxy FAIL when shooting half the time. That's contrary to the lore and creates cognitive dissonance. The mechanics are WORSE than MTP because they produce results that are less fun/less realistic than just deciding what's cool.

Hiram McDaniels wrote:I admit I’m not very familiar with fatal's core mechanic.

I can't remember if this is from FATAL or some other awful system, but - first roll 1d100 to find out the probability to succeed, then roll 1d100 and see if it's below that to tell whether you did. That is, flip a coin in an overly complex way.

Hiram McDaniels wrote:What I’m wondering is what a bad output looks like, and what a good output entails.

A system has specific goals*. Those vary from project to project, but it probably includes at least trying to emulate a specific genre of fiction, resolve uncertain outcomes, and align everyone's expectations for what happens within the shared world. The outputs are what you get from the system by following its rules, and how good or bad they are depend on how well they meet the design goals.

For the standard goals, a "worse than magic tea party" system would presumably:
- Do even worse at emulating its genre than an average GM can make up on the spot.
- Resolve uncertainty even worse than a human attempting to make up random numbers (wow). You could do that by breaking your RNG so the answer is always obvious.
- Do worse at aligning expectations than trying to guess what's going on in the GM's head. You could do this with prose that's misaligned with the mechanics, or make the mechanics so opaque that nobody knows what to expect will come out the other end.


* I mean, hopefully. Having design goals is a prerequisite to having an actual design. Otherwise it's just someone's favorite mechanics in a blender.

jt wrote:

Hiram McDaniels wrote:I admit I’m not very familiar with fatal's core mechanic.

I can't remember if this is from FATAL or some other awful system, but - first roll 1d100 to find out the probability to succeed, then roll 1d100 and see if it's below that to tell whether you did. That is, flip a coin in an overly complex way.

I have an idea that original Traveller did something similar i.e. the GM rolls 2d6 and the result is the target number the PC needs to get.

However, it was very much a last resort, for situations where the GM didn't have a clue what the difficulty of the task was i.e. the GM was supposed to try Magic Tea Party first.

jt wrote:I can't remember if this is from FATAL or some other awful system, but - first roll 1d100 to find out the probability to succeed, then roll 1d100 and see if it's below that to tell whether you did. That is, flip a coin in an overly complex way.

That was FATAL, yeah.

Personally, I thought the idea might have some merit, iff it is a situation that might occur again and you write down the difficulty and use it again. Would still be better to work it out right the first time, but at least you can get some consistency and back to being predictable.

With writing it down, you've got a decent concept for a one-off humor RPG. d20, roll equal or higher than the target difficulty to succeed. If it's never been tried before, d20 to determine the target difficulty.

A couple of rolls later, you find out that in this world slaying a dragon is much easier than opening a door.