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

[Lago PARANOIA]

There is something wrong and boring about a combat system where the situation doesn't change between turns 1 and 6.

Yes, obviously it would be great if this wasn't the case. And you know what? Sometimes you get your wish and it does happen after all. Sometimes the enemy transforms into their Hell Angel form or the initial wave of soldiers retreat only to be backed up by the Elite Magma guard (ttly different set of abilities u gaiz!). As long as we're talking about best-case scenarios, it would also be great if everyone took acting lessons and three courses on creative writing and also spent at least 20 hours a year drilling simple math operations.

I've heard this non-solution solution towards shaking things many a times and I'm skeptical of this to the point of being actively contemptuous. This is the worst kind of 'blame the DM and players for their human limitations' Gygaxian shit. Just out of principle I feel that you should be looking for an alternate solution to fix this problem if at all possible.

But you know what? Even if the DMs and players decide that this is their responsibility and on their heads be it, this doesn't actually happen in practice. Why? I'll post that big blob of text again to tell why this won't actually happen.

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.

Somehow PhoneLobster misconstrued that to think that I am against 'other ways' of introducing tactical complexity. I'm not, I just think that relying on the old chestnuts (monsters, wild and wooly battlefields, Fog of War, Eigenplots, etc.) has been inadequate and we need other wakes to shake things up.

[Kaelik]

1) Mind telling me why it's so important for your full suite of utility powers to always be available whenever you want?

Learn to read, because it's a waste of WoF slots. Not about having them all open all the time, but if you are just going to wait 6 rounds, you might as well do it now.

2) I gave a proposed method on how to combat this problem in one of my posts. Feel free to read it.

Lago, stop being stupid. I've proposed four methods to combat that problem, but all those methods involve severe compromises or using aspects of a system that is less shitty than WoF.

Also stop saying "Somewhere in 38 pages of me blathering about WoF is a solution to this problem, you can't complain until you've read it." If you have a solution, repost the solution.

That would mean something if eliminating option paralysis was the only aim of WoF.

Yes, it's almost like I have explicitly criticized every one of your design goals as complete bullshit several times and you never respond.

1) If you're doing an At-Will only system and you go into combat with a shittier set you're stuck with a shitty set for the rest of combat. At least in WoF you have a chance of rolling a good set. I feel this is an advantage, because people are more peeved about bad luck then they're encouraged by good luck and also because it's easier to placate people if you say that their luck could turn around in 1 rounds instead of 5.

You are retarded. You just don't make a shitty set of powers. The point is that it's a lot more likely that a game with 15 classes, each of which has 6 combat powers is going to have 15 classes with 6 good powers than a WoF where you have 15 classes with 36 powers each, with all good powers. Eventually you start making shitty powers, and every time you do, it reduces the actual number of choices that they make each round, till they are really only evaluating 3-4 powers each round, and then some of them are obviously not fit in the situation, and you are making choices with 1-2 powers actually worth using each round.

2) I'm actually not a fan of people planning their actions in advance more than one round. The first is because this leads to scripting--coming up with a brand-new script every combat is actually kind of interesting and clever, but if you have the same set of powers then it leads to similar or identical scripts which gets old fast. The second is because it encourages people to overlook or ignore the tactical situation because a lot of human beings have trouble abandoning bad or suboptimal plans once they invested enough effort into them.

Once again, yes, we know you have an irrational hatred or strategy, or tactics, or anything other than WoF no matter what it is, we know you hate every possible system that someone might use to decide what ability to use other than rolling a die. You've said that many times. But a) most people disagree with you, and think being able to make decisions based on past and future effects is good, and b) that you personally are irrationally opposed to any non WoF system is not a good argument for anything.

3) Who cares if your powers you have available are shittier than a supposed optimal power? I don't really give a shit if you're fighting Frost Giants and a fire-themed power never came up. It's not like you didn't get to make choices among your other powers. If you don't get Fireball when fighting a Treant, tough cookiepuss. Figure out which out of X number of spells is the best. Stop throwing a hissy fit because your plans got a slight derail.

You are an idiot. That has literally nothing to do with what I said. I said nothing about having an optimal power. I said, very specifically, that having more combat powers that don't do anything is completely meaningless. If you have a choice between 6 powers or a set of 6 powers that is just as good, but changes randomly, you are not going to get a better combat result. Since you are not going to get a better combat result the fact that you have 36 combat powers, of which you use 6, is not meaningful, where you can have 6 and use 6 and that's basically the same thing.

Notice that that has literally nothing to do with the bullshit you are talking about, because you need to learn to read.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You are an idiot. That has literally nothing to do with what I said. I said nothing about having an optimal power. I said, very specifically, that having more combat powers that don't do anything is completely meaningless. If you have a choice between 6 powers or a set of 6 powers that is just as good, but changes randomly, you are not going to get a better combat result. Since you are not going to get a better combat result the fact that you have 36 combat powers, of which you use 6, is not meaningful, where you can have 6 and use 6 and that's basically the same thing.

Except that you almost certainly do get the opportunity to use some of those 30 other powers later in the fight.

[Kaelik]

You are an idiot. That has literally nothing to do with what I said. I said nothing about having an optimal power. I said, very specifically, that having more combat powers that don't do anything is completely meaningless. If you have a choice between 6 powers or a set of 6 powers that is just as good, but changes randomly, you are not going to get a better combat result. Since you are not going to get a better combat result the fact that you have 36 combat powers, of which you use 6, is not meaningful, where you can have 6 and use 6 and that's basically the same thing.

Except that you almost certainly do get the opportunity to use some of those 30 other powers later in the fight.

So your fights last 30 rounds? I was under the impression you were aiming for six round fights, which is still too long, but if you are aiming for 30 round fights, that's a whole new set of shit I have to make fun of.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Argh, I forgot how aggravating it is to argue with someone who pulls strawmen out of their ass and constantly complains about people not reading their posts when they didn't go along with the strawman.

But let's try to decipher this anyway.

Learn to read, because it's a waste of WoF slots. Not about having them all open all the time, but if you are just going to wait 6 rounds, you might as well do it now.

1) What a lame and narrow view of utility powers. You're telling me it's never been the case where you had to make a split-second situation as to what non-combat power you had to use and that being off by even one round could screw you?

2) The idea of utility powers being just jammed in the WoF matrix and displacing combat powers is your idea, not mine. No one ever said anything like that. Yes, it is sort of implied that this might be the case because D&D's spellcasting system works like that but it's disingenuous to assume this is the case. Especially when I gave a proposal of a system that wouldn't work like this (it works SIMILAR to this, but not the same) and then later you said you don't have time to read the whole thread.

So! Stick Strawman #1 up your ass.

Yes, it's almost like I have explicitly criticized every one of your design goals as complete bullshit several times and you never respond.

Also stop saying "Somewhere in 38 pages of me blathering about WoF is a solution to this problem, you can't complain until you've read it." If you have a solution, repost the solution.

(I wonder if he notices the hypocrisy)

You are retarded. You just don't make a shitty set of powers. The point is that it's a lot more likely that a game with 15 classes, each of which has 6 combat powers is going to have 15 classes with 6 good powers than a WoF where you have 15 classes with 36 powers each, with all good powers. Eventually you start making shitty powers, and every time you do, it reduces the actual number of choices that they make each round, till they are really only evaluating 3-4 powers each round, and then some of them are obviously not fit in the situation, and you are making choices with 1-2 powers actually worth using each round.

You're going to accuse me of not reading what you say when you say shit like this? People on the TGD need to stop doing this, it leads to hilarious hypocrisy. Other people on this thread have addressed this point, repeatedly; if you're going to whine about me not reading everything you post, why didn't you read what they said?

Once again, yes, we know you have an irrational hatred or strategy, or tactics, or anything other than WoF no matter what it is, we know you hate every possible system that someone might use to decide what ability to use other than rolling a die.

Feel free to shove Strawman #2 up your ass.

You are an idiot. That has literally nothing to do with what I said. I said nothing about having an optimal power. I said, very specifically, that having more combat powers that don't do anything is completely meaningless.

No no no. You're not weaseling out of that. Here's what you said:

But honestly, it doesn't actually do 1 at all. I mean, it either means you have different abilities each round, or it limits choices, but compared to 6 at will, a 36 WoF doesn't actually give you more powers, it gives you 6 combat powers that change, but see the thing about earlier, having more combat powers only matters if one of them gives you a better result in combat.

The thing what you're missing is that cycling through more powers increases your opportunity of having the 'best result' all things being equal. The only way you'd think that this was a pity is if the randomness barred you from rolling a fireball against a Troll. But the At-Will person who didn't select any fire or acid powers is never going to get a 'best result' power; the only way they would think they were better off is if they had arranged their power setup so that they always had a Super Secret Best Spell, meaning that they're ALSO the only ones who think that being forced to look through more moves is a waste of time because they were happy with their original array. Which isn't much of a stretch at all, since practically every system had this problem.

Notice that that has literally nothing to do with the bullshit you are talking about, because you need to learn to read.

And you need to learn to read AND get your sniveling projectionism under control. If you cure one of those I'll work on the other.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So your fights last 30 rounds? I was under the impression you were aiming for six round fights, which is still too long, but if you are aiming for 30 round fights, that's a whole new set of shit I have to make fun of.

No, and I think we're having a communication problem. What I am saying is that in a 5 round fight you will probably roll 3 or 4 of your 6 rows at some point during the fight; you are still going to actually use no more than 5 abilities, presuming that you can only use one ability per round, but there are 18 or 24 abilities that you might have used during that fight, and the number of different abilities you use in that 5 round fight is most likely going to be 5, unless the fight is very tactically simple, in which case it will probably be 4.

If you have 6 abilities at-will all the time, the number of abilities that you might have used during a 5 round fight is 6, which means that the number of different abilities you use during the fight seems extremely unlikely to be greater than 3 unless your abilities naturally promote being used in sequence.

If you are not concerned about the fact that you are probably going to be doing almost the exact same thing every fight, then WoF probably isn't going to benefit you.

[PhoneLobster]

2) When that kind of tactical depth was brought up in prior discussions as an alternative means of creating variety in combat Lago and Frank told us that it was a bad thing that it was too complex, didn't work and they were implementing WoF instead of doing that.

You know, for someone who accuses people of not reading things...

... my summary was remarkably accurate and remains so even after you took the time to call it out..

Even your response to my point about "Variety via Salamander" pretty much holds to you telling us that it doesn't work. Which means that YOU really need to take the time to tell some of the other WoF fan boys on this thread that they need to stop using "Variety via Salamander" as a crutch they feel they need to make WoF work.

You say "we can totally use that", but you also say that you don't think it works. That means that those suckers trying to use the Variety Via Salamander argument to create a "tactical depth" scenario that supposedly refutes a rather significant criticism of WoF are WRONG. And wrong according to you.

Do please take the time to try and reform the pro WoF faction and it's arguments until it agrees with itself.

Why? Because I will find it entertaining. Go to it.

edit: Hell make it a Thread, some sort of "Pro WoF guys try to get their shit together and almost certainly end up yelling at each other instead" thread. But please, make it the last WoF spam thread for at LEAST the next five minutes.

[Josh_Kablack]

But please, make it the last WoF spam thread for at LEAST the next five minutes.

Link Related

[DSMatticus]

... the fact that you have 36 combat powers, of which you use 6, is not meaningful, where you can have 6 and use 6 and that's basically the same thing.

Fuck, this is stupid.

Here's a fucking question for you: there are 36 cards, you draw 6. Is this the same as there being 6 cards and drawing 6 cards?

Here's another math-driven counter-example for this annoyingly, frustratingly stupid assertion, using the number of distinct options you are presented over the course of a 2-round fight:
Case 1, 6 at-will abilities:
Round 1: You are exposed to 6 new options
Round 2: You are exposed to the same 6 options.
Result: You had 6 unique options presented to you.

Case 2, 6x6 matrix:
Round 1: You are exposed to 6 new options.
Round 2a: You roll the same matrix slot, and are exposed to the same 6 options. (1/6th chance)
Round 2b: You roll a different matrix slot, and are exposed to 6 new options.
Result: You had 12 unique options presented to you 5/6th of the time, and 6 unique options presented to you 1/6th of the time, for a weighted average of 11 unique options.

I don't care that you hate WoF, but this part of your argument is beyond stupid. You are asserting that (6 choose 1)*(6 choose 1) maps to (6 choose 1).

[Kaelik]

Here's a fucking question for you: there are 36 cards, you draw 6. Is this the same as there being 6 cards and drawing 6 cards?

Please learn to read:

Since having more combat powers doesn't mean anything, unless it changes the result, the WoF does not provide any benefits.

If you are playing Blackjack with yourself, and are shuffling after every hand, it doesn't matter if you have one deck, or 30 decks, because when you draw six cards, they are the same six cards.

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist. If they add to 21 either way, they are equivalent.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist. If they add to 21 either way, they are equivalent.

As I suspected, our disconnect is because we have differing goals; you are not interested in variety of combat, I am.

[quanta]

Yes, obviously it would be great if this wasn't the case. And you know what? Sometimes you get your wish and it does happen after all. Sometimes the enemy transforms into their Hell Angel form or the initial wave of soldiers retreat only to be backed up by the Elite Magma guard (ttly different set of abilities u gaiz!). As long as we're talking about best-case scenarios, it would also be great if everyone took acting lessons and three courses on creative writing and also spent at least 20 hours a year drilling simple math operations.

I've heard this non-solution solution towards shaking things many a times and I'm skeptical of this to the point of being actively contemptuous. This is the worst kind of 'blame the DM and players for their human limitations' Gygaxian shit. Just out of principle I feel that you should be looking for an alternate solution to fix this problem if at all possible.

But you know what? Even if the DMs and players decide that this is their responsibility and on their heads be it, this doesn't actually happen in practice. Why? I'll post that big blob of text again to tell why this won't actually happen.

What the fuck are you talking about Lago? Where did I say this was a player/DM side problem? I called it a fucking system problem. DM's and players use a system. They aren't the fucking system. Stop telling other people to "L2R my fucking ten page essay nub" if you can't fucking read a three paragraph comment (generously counting some of my sentences as paragraphs). What I said was if your combat system does not generate natural variance between turns 1 and 6, something is fucking wrong.

To be even more clear, I'm talking about variance within a single battle. If you fight the goblin archers behind trolls twice (or some other similar battle), that's the same type of battle, but that battle has internal variance. Killing the trolls necessitates different tactics than catching up to the archers and fucking them up or shooting them to pieces from a distance. There's a natural transition in the battle when you breakthrough the chokepoint. I'm not talking about making those two battles different, which WoF might aid if you make an extremely diverse power list or sufficiently restrict placing powers in the matrix. I'm talking about the situation within a single battle changing somewhat so that you can't be told what the starting situation is then know the single obviously optimal move (or optimal move from each row in WoF) regardless of how far the battle has progressed.

There are many ways to get the variation I want. Condition tracks or conditions based upon HP, fatigue systems, powers that encourage a combo set up, systems with simple and easy support for making capturing and holding terrain an important or even necessary part of tactics. And of course, innumerable other ways.

Do you know what doesn't fucking do that? WoF. Whether or not WoF will possess this property has nothing to do with WoF itself and everything to do with the actual powers you write.

All WoF does is make the narrative less repetitive. If Bob the Fighter run by a 12 year old either hits shit with his sword every turn (at-will) or randomly picks whatever sounds coolest from his selection that turn (WoF), nothing has changed in a meaningful sense other than narrative flow. Yes, WoF will be more interesting in that sense. But if people can't handle choosing from the ability lists in 4e then they are even more fucked for not being options paralyzed in WoF where their choice set is different from turn to turn (and seriously, it's disingenuous to include the item powers in that count; most people who freeze up often freeze up just choosing between at-will and encounter powers. There's about fucking 6-7 of those at max level. And you start with 3. THIS SOUNDS REMARKABLY LIKE THE PROPOSED SCALING FOR THE ROWS OF A CERTAIN MATRIX.)

I'll give you that WoF won't make people scared of using a power for fear of not having it later, and this can be a good thing. But that, narrative variety, and variety for the sake of variety are about all of its benefits. And there are definite costs for having to write up significantly more powers, raising the bar of system mastery (how to optimally place powers in the WoF matrix is an additional step to the normal step of determining which powers are optimal that already occurs in 4e or with 3e spontaneous casters), and increasing the influence of randomness on battle outcomes (although some people will find this last one a plus).

[DSMatticus]

Since having more combat powers doesn't mean anything, unless it changes the result, the WoF does not provide any benefits.

I will hold you to this statement, and show you why it is stupid the same way I did 2 pages ago.

Character 1 has six abilities, A1-A6.
Character 2 has a 6x6 matrix, A1-A6, B1-B6, ..., F1-F6.
The 'results' are different the second character 2 rolls anything but a 1, because character 1 can never use ANY ability that isn't in A.

More thorough counter-example:
Character 1 has his same six abilities, and uses each of them over 6 rounds, then repeats one on a seventh round.
Character 2 has his same 6x6 matrix, uses abilities A1-A6, by rolling 1 six times, and then rolling 2 and using B1.
The results are even more clearly different, because character 1 used six different abilities, and character 2 used seven different abilities.

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist. If they add to 21 either way, they are equivalent.

Counter-example:

Character 1 has six abilities, all of which do fire damage.
Character 2 has a WoF matrix, one row of which does only fire damage, and five rows of which do nothing but water damage.
They fight a fire-immune water-vulnerable monster that can kill them both in one hit, but they win initiative and go first, and any water ability can kill the monster in one hit.

Character 1) Will always use a fire ability, and lose to the monster.
Character 2) Will use a fire ability 1/6th of the time, and a water ability 5/6th of the time.

Or to put it in your blackjack example: try winning blackjack with a deck consisting of {2,2,2,2,3,3}. Guess what? You fucking can't. Having more possibilities leads to more possible outcomes. Yay, fucking math.

But even ignoring all of that, you are shitting all over probability theory. Fuck you, stop doing that. This is math, and you're wrong. (6 choose 1)(6 choose 1) does not map to (6 choose 1). There is no way you can represent every possible outcome of the former inside the latter: so yes, a 6x6 WoF matrix has results that will never map to having 6 at-wills, no more than you can fit 36 inside 6.

Edit: P.S., if your measure of valid combat options is 'whether you win or not,' you can't argue that a weighted coin flip is any worse as a combat resolution mechanic than anything else. You just calculate the odds of the players winning, and flip a weighted coin to see if they win or lose. After all, as far as you're concerned, that's directly equivalent: having more options is just clutter in the way of figuring out whether you 'win' or not.

[Kaelik]

Or to put it in your blackjack example: try winning blackjack with a deck consisting of {2,2,2,2,3,3}. Guess what? You fucking can't.

Solution: Don't make a class that is shit.

(6 choose 1)(6 choose 1) does not map to (6 choose 1). There is no way you can represent every possible outcome of the former inside the latter: so yes, a 6x6 WoF matrix has results that will never map to having 6 at-wills, no more than you can fit 36 inside 6.

Please Please Please Please learn to read. I have never claimed that every possible outcome is identical. It is equivalent. Make a goddam Matrix, and I will prove my point, but until you see that making slightly different choices about how to kill your foes with slightly different powers each round is just as interesting as making the same choices with 6 repeating powers, you need to stop whining about how 6 does not equal 36. We all know that.

If someone rolls a one on every single WoF roll, for the entire game, without fail, they are still playing the same game as everyone else, in pretty much every way. That's it. Rolling a one every single time still means you are making the same choices, from the same list of available options as everyone else, but without the arbitrary variance, which adds nothing to the game.

Edit: P.S., if your measure of valid combat options is 'whether you win or not,' you can't argue that a weighted coin flip is any worse as a combat resolution mechanic than anything else. You just calculate the odds of the players winning, and flip a weighted coin to see if they win or lose. After all, as far as you're concerned, that's directly equivalent: having more options is just clutter in the way of figuring out whether you 'win' or not.

No, because the only measure of the combat options is not "whether you win or not" it's also "the decisions you make, and how they effect (1)." Which, since they are equivalent, if not more in the favor of the at will usage, as far as the ability to make choices that effect the outcome, the WoF 36 and the at will 6 are still pretty much identical in combat, except one has forced arbitrary variance that adds nothing to the game.

[DSMatticus]

Solution: Don't make a class that is shit.

No, that's not the point. That is a simple mathematical example of how 36 draw 6 is different than 6 draw 6, which was your point. You literally fucking said, "you don't need 36 draw 6, because you can get all the important bits out of 6 draw 6." And now I have shown you that you can't get the same results out of 6 draw 6 you can out of 36 draw 6, using a solid counterexample.

Having 36 different abilities is different than having 6 abilities. I have shown you this in a half dozen fucking ways.

Here, let me pose something to you that's simpler so maybe you will finally get the difference: you have one guy who, every round, uses 1 of 6 abilities, then you have another guy who alternates, every round, between using one of 6 abilities and then using one of a different 6 abilities.

Are those equivalent situations?

slightly different powers

One, this is a problem of power design, not resource management. These are two entirely different things.

Two, are wall of ice and wall of fire slightly different powers? They are categorically the same (a wall), yet they both do things completely differently.

If someone rolls a one on every single WoF roll, for the entire game, without fail, they are still playing the same game as everyone else, in pretty much every way.

But the second they roll a two, they are no longer in the game everyone else is playing.

No, because the only measure of the combat options is not "whether you win or not"

I redirect you to your own quote:

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist.

If you'd like to argue with yourself, be my guest, but you don't need me for that. Your original argument was, "the fact that you could have drawn more possible 6-card hands from a 36 card deck than a 6 card deck is meaningless because the goal of combat is to win, and you can win eitherway." Which turned out to not only be mathematically false, depending on the elements that make up the 6-card deck, but now your argument is, "winning isn't the only thing."

[Kaelik]

You literally fucking said, "you don't need 36 draw 6, because you can get all the important bits out of 6 draw 6." And now I have shown you that you can't get the same results out of 6 draw 6 you can out of 36 draw 6, using a solid counterexample.

No, you made up the assumption that people will pick six identical abilities for their at wills, which is a Strawman. You do in fact get all the important bits out of 6 draw 6. As I have explained many times.

In any given situation in which you have an AW6 and WoF36, the choice, each and every round of combat, is going to be very similar between the two characters, so similar that the difference between the choices of a Fighter WoF36 and a Wizard WoF36 would probably be more divergent than a Fighter WoF36 and a Fighter AW6 or a Wizard WoF36 and a Wizard AW6.

The only difference is a completely meaningless and arbitrary forced variance for the WoF characters that the AW characters don't have.

Each round, both characters are faced with the same choices.

Having 36 different abilities is different than having 6 abilities. I have shown you this in a half dozen fucking ways.

2.9999 is different than 3. But it's not meaningfully different from 3 if you are attempting to calculate how long an object takes to fall that distance. WoF36 and AW6 are different, but they are not meaningfully different in the manner that each character approaches combat, except of course, that the AW6 character can plan ahead, and the WoF character cannot.

One, this is a problem of power design, not resource management. These are two entirely different things.

No, this isn't a problem of power design, it's a problem of WoF design. If you have six columns next to each other, it is imperative that each column share enough in common with the others, because each column is capable of dealing with a wide variety of situations, and must be a complete move set without reference to the other columns. Therefore, each column must overlap in that they must all be able to deal approximately as well with any given situation.

Two, are wall of ice and wall of fire slightly different powers? They are categorically the same (a wall), yet they both do things completely differently.

Yes, Wall of Ice and Wall of Fire are slightly different powers. Having a character that chooses each round from an AW6 which includes Wall of Ice is fundamentally very similar to having a character that chooses each round from a WoF36 that includes Wall of Ice in one column and Wall of Fire in another, and Wall of Bone in another.

One of them can plan ahead, and the other has arbitrary forced variance.

But the second they roll a two, they are no longer in the game everyone else is playing.

You misunderstand. If you have a party of 4 WoF36 characters, even if one of them rolls a one every single time, the entire game, they still play exactly the same as every other WoF36 character, and never feel like they are missing out on options compared to other characters.

This despite that such a result is actually identical to an AW6 character.

Hence an AW6 character plays exactly like a WoF36 character.

No, because the only measure of the combat options is not "whether you win or not"

I redirect you to your own quote:

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist.

If you'd like to argue with yourself, be my guest, but you don't need me for that. Your original argument was, "the fact that you could have drawn more possible 6-card hands from a 36 card deck than a 6 card deck is meaningless because the goal of combat is to win, and you can win eitherway." Which turned out to not only be mathematically false, depending on the elements that make up the 6-card deck, but now your argument is, "winning isn't the only thing."

Please learn to read... again.

1) The goal of combat is to win. (This is the second statement you quoted.)
2) The only measure of combat options is not just whether you win, but also what decisions you make, and how they effect (1). (This is the second statement.)

Notice how there is no contradiction, because the goal of combat, and the measurements we take of a particular method of resolving combat are not the same thing, and are not even comparable.

[PhoneLobster]

Since the goal of combat is to win, and you win just as well whether you are drawing 6 cards from 36, or you have the only six cards that exist. If they add to 21 either way, they are equivalent.

As I suspected, our disconnect is because we have differing goals; you are not interested in variety of combat, I am.

Oh hi. WoF designers had something to say about what they want from combat...

The problem is that your addendum is horse shit. You aren't coming into the round wanting to "entangle" Clock King, you're coming into the round wanting to defeat Clock King.

The great thing about WoF is how every ass who wants it all wants something completely different.

[RobbyPants]

Well thats a question of whether Lago can write 60ish (I'm allowing for some power incest but still requiring enough for two people of the same class to look very different) abilities per class that fulfill that criteria.

Somebody remind me the math on 4e, how many powers did they have per class? I know it's been ran before, but I'm too lazy to do it again. Hell, how many spells does a 3.5 wizard have? How many maneuvers does each school in Tome of Battle have?

Well, yes, you can write 60+ power, but will they be good? I've never played 4.0, but in 3.5, there is a huge gap between the best and worst spells and maneuvers. ToB is particularly bad about this, because the list to draw from is so small to begin with.

[Swordslinger]

I'll give you that WoF won't make people scared of using a power for fear of not having it later, and this can be a good thing. But that, narrative variety, and variety for the sake of variety are about all of its benefits. And there are definite costs for having to write up significantly more powers, raising the bar of system mastery (how to optimally place powers in the WoF matrix is an additional step to the normal step of determining which powers are optimal that already occurs in 4e or with 3e spontaneous casters), and increasing the influence of randomness on battle outcomes (although some people will find this last one a plus).

Exactly. WoF's only real benefit is that you won't get someone saying "I magic missile it" for 4 rounds in a row.

It won't cure action paralysis, it's going to make the game more complicated and it won't make the game more strategic. In fact, people wanting to play strategic would slow the game down a lot because it'd require a lot of table talk trying to synergize everyone's abilities.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What the fuck are you talking about Lago? Where did I say this was a player/DM side problem?

A lot of the traditional ways and even some of your proposed methods rely on explicit DM or player input. Meaning that whether you intended it or not, you're blaming the group. Like right here.

I'm not talking about making those two battles different, which WoF might aid if you make an extremely diverse power list or sufficiently restrict placing powers in the matrix. I'm talking about the situation within a single battle changing somewhat so that you can't be told what the starting situation is then know the single obviously optimal move (or optimal move from each row in WoF) regardless of how far the battle has progressed.

This doesn't just naturally happen! I'm sure you've seen countless battles where the tactical setup changes, perhaps even dramatically, but still:

A) This doesn't shake things up enough to push players out of their preferred tactic. Especially if they have a generalized tactic like Thunderwave or Twin Strike or whatever.

B) The DM has to create these situations. Chokepoints don't just naturally happen. Critters going One Winged Angel and developing a new set of better or crippled or different attacks doesn't just happen. The flow of battle swinging when the players capture a piece of terrain doesn't just happen. If you're saying that the reason why the game doesn't have the tactical depth you want is because battles don't have enough of these elements then guess what--you're blaming the DM!

Yes, WoF will be more interesting in that sense. But if people can't handle choosing from the ability lists in 4e then they are even more fucked for not being options paralyzed in WoF where their choice set is different from turn to turn

As Frank and DSM have told you, memorizing what your options do is easier than picking them. Of course you want players new to the game to be able to pick up and play which is why I proposed row scaling such that people get comfortable with their powers and the system before adding more.

NONETHELESS once people get a handle on their powers there's still option paralysis. For 4E characters who don't have a clear hierarchy of powers like wizards they're looking at 9-13 potential powers by level 12 or so. That's too many.

There are many ways to get the variation I want. Condition tracks or conditions based upon HP, fatigue systems, powers that encourage a combo set up, systems with simple and easy support for making capturing and holding terrain an important or even necessary part of tactics.

Hey, you know what system had those conditions you're talking about? 4th Edition D&D. There is not a single thing you listed with the exception of perhaps fatigue (depending on how you define it) that the game doesn't have. I'm sure that you can do a No True Scotsman and say that the game doesn't take it far enough, but seriously how much further did you want it without resorting to mathhammers?

And of course, innumerable other ways.

Ways. Lots of ways. Many ways.

Do you know what doesn't fucking do that? WoF. Whether or not WoF will possess this property has nothing to do with WoF itself and everything to do with the actual powers you write.

It does, actually.

1) If the player has a situationally unfitting or suboptimal tactical setup (melee combatant with ranged fire powers against elder fire elementals) it gives them a chance to go through a power that might have an effect all along. People notice bad runs more than good runs and having rounds when the best power is only slightly better than the worst one you have available is more tolerable than having combats like this.

2) It's boring when people find out the 'best' power and they spam it repeatedly. Determining that Spell F is super-effective against these skeletons is nice and all, but it's very likely that it'll be super-effective again and again, especially if you have a small suite of powers to look through. Spells X, R, and H might not be as game-changingly crushing as Spell F but they're still better than the other 22+ powers. They do deserve a prize for figuring out the best power. The first time. After that they should really be using something else. An array of XRFH is just more interesting and engaging for the other players than FFFF. Various methods have been tried to get people to use XRFH when FFFF was an option without using WoF but they've never worked.

[Username17]

Kaelik, for fuck's sake: shut up. You are embarrassing yourself, and need to rethink your priorities. You need to understand that the people arguing against you actually can read and actually have read your posts. The reason they are not convinced is because your argument is shit. It is mathematically provably false, and has actually been proven false. And the fact that you keep making it over and over again and acting like you have some brilliant insight that others are too foolish or stubborn to understand is pathetic. I totally feel sorry for you at this point, but if you keep spamming this thread with your bullshit I am just going to put you on ignore.

Claim One: AW6 is the “same” as WoF6. This is false. Yes, we understand that in a single round, AW6 is the same as a WoF6 character who happens to have the same six moves in this round's moveset as the AW6 character has every round. Noone is confused on this point, and you repeatedly falling back on this identity is not clever or new or even contested. The problem with your analysis is that there is also next round. This means that if the AW6 character doesn't have an ideal move for this round, he also won't have one next round or the one after that. The WoF6 character still might. That's a difference. In fact, that's a really fucking huge difference, especially if you include puzzle monsters or battle-turning maneuvers – because the difference between having an ideal move available on turn 2 or 3 may in fact be dramatically different in outcome from never having one on any round.

Claim Two: Utility Powers are a “waste” of a WoF slot. This is so stupid of a thing to say that it is not even wrong. It's an argument against being able to trade combat power for non-combat power, but that's not even a facet of WoF. You might as well be bitching about how Utility Powers are a “waste” of an AW6 slot or a “waste” of a power charge or something. Whether you give people Utility Powers, how many of them you give out, and what you charge people for the utility powers you give them is a question that revolves around how important the combat minigame is to your game, and has actually fuck-all to do with whether you are using WoF or not. It's just a non-sequitur on your part.

Now as it happens, your objection is actually worse even than that, because WoF really does handle Utility Powers better than At-Will or Charge Casting. If you were concerned about the relative cost of Utility Powers in Combat Powers in WoF, you'd give people a “Utility Column” that was full of Utility Powers. So let's say you set it to one Utility Column and still wanted people to be making choices from 6 options each round. That would give the WoF6 character five “combat” options and one “utility” option each round, but out of combat they'd still have six non-combat Utility Powers to use. The AW6 character would have one utility option each round and only one non-combat Utility Power for out of combat use too! Or you could allow them to match the WoF utility set by giving them 6 Utility Powers and then they wouldn't have any combat powers at all. Again: on pure math grounds you are wrong. WoF is by definition more capable of integrating “non-combat” powers that can also be used during the combat minigame without contributing to option paralysis. Because you only have to reduce the number of combat options per round by 1 to increase the number of combat-usable non-combat options by the number of WoF rows while preserving the same choice load. That is a provably better exchange rate than other systems, almost all of them introduce combat-usable non-combat options at a 1:1 exchange rate with combat options for choice load.

So seriously Kaelik: shut the fuck up. Right now I feel sorry for you, but if you keep spamming the thread with mathematically provably false horse shit after it has already been disproven with math, then I am going to assume you are in an Elennsar phase and put you on ignore. I am in Africa and have to pay for my fucking wireless time, and I can't be fucked to deal with you making the same false claims over and fucking over again.

PL: that goes double for you.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

OOoOoOooo shit guys he's gonna put you on ignore!

[Josh_Kablack]

I think the biggest false claims so far are that

1. That more than 10% of the posters in this thread are ever going to do anything at all using WoF.

2. That the other 90% actually give a fuck what that 10% might do.

Congrats, it's a edition war for an edition that doesn't even exist.

[MGuy]

Frank, where you are doesn't make your words more valuable to anybody. Though I agree with Frank on this one.

[Kaelik]

The problem with your analysis is that there is also next round. This means that if the AW6 character doesn't have an ideal move for this round, he also won't have one next round or the one after that. The WoF6 character still might. That's a difference. In fact, that's a really fucking huge difference, especially if you include puzzle monsters or battle-turning maneuvers – because the difference between having an ideal move available on turn 2 or 3 may in fact be dramatically different in outcome from never having one on any round.

It's funny that you say everyone totally understands my argument, and then demonstrate that you don't understand my argument. Apparently the failure must be on how I am explaining it, because aside from all pro WoF people being dicks who purposefully bamboozle themselves into misunderstanding my points so they can dismiss it as easily as possible, that's all that could be causing such a continuous misunderstanding.

The second set of 6 powers is going to be pretty much equivalent to the first set of 6 powers. Having 6 then a different 6 is pretty much exactly like being an AW fighter, then being a slightly different AW fighter next round.

Yes, it's theoretically possible that you might stumble upon an "ideal" power, but in practice, you are going to be making a choice between a series of generally applicable powers that are just as useful as the AW6 guys powers. So what actually happens is that you are slightly worse every round until you are slightly better if you get an "ideal" power. Because the AW6 set can take advantage of having fewer powers to have all the slightly more generally useful ones in one line, and can take advantage of the ability to plan ahead, and so the WoF36 character is slightly worse each round, until they are slightly better because they got the "ideal" power, which in practice isn't going to be much better than a general power.

Yes, if you are Fighting Undead, and the WoF character get's hold undead, he's slightly better that round, but on the other hand, the AW character got to use Hold Monster on the first round, which isn't quite as good against undead, but still get's the job done better than the Fireball the WoF character got the first round, or the Black Tentacles that he got the second.

You might as well be bitching about how Utility Powers are a “waste” of an AW6 slot or a “waste” of a power charge or something. Whether you give people Utility Powers, how many of them you give out, and what you charge people for the utility powers you give them is a question that revolves around how important the combat minigame is to your game, and has actually fuck-all to do with whether you are using WoF or not. It's just a non-sequitur on your part.

No, it's actually not, because WoF actually does have consequences for how you give out powers, as much as you and Lago and DSM want to deny it. If you have a WoF system, designed to give X choices a round, and you have utility powers, then either:

1) Those utility powers come at the direct expense of combat powers in the decision area, reducing your choices below X.

2) Those utility powers come outside the WoF matrix completely, meaning that you are faced with:
a) Having to explain why some things are WoF and some not, on each and every character.
b) Make a second WoF matrix, that causes problems both if someone wants to use the utility in combat, and results in a lot of pointlessness out of combat.

Yes, if True Seeing is on your WoF matrix, that really does cost you every time you roll a 3, and you only have 5 options instead of 6.

Now as it happens, your objection is actually worse even than that, because WoF really does handle Utility Powers better than At-Will or Charge Casting. If you were concerned about the relative cost of Utility Powers in Combat Powers in WoF, you'd give people a “Utility Column” that was full of Utility Powers. So let's say you set it to one Utility Column and still wanted people to be making choices from 6 options each round. That would give the WoF6 character five “combat” options and one “utility” option each round, but out of combat they'd still have six non-combat Utility Powers to use. The AW6 character would have one utility option each round and only one non-combat Utility Power for out of combat use too! Or you could allow them to match the WoF utility set by giving them 6 Utility Powers and then they wouldn't have any combat powers at all.

Yeah, that would be totally true... If you ignored everything I said about Utility powers in an AW system. Or, you could not have utility powers count against the AW6 would be the combat part, and then you could add as many non combat actions as you want.

more capable of integrating “non-combat” powers that can also be used during the combat minigame without contributing to option paralysis. Because you only have to reduce the number of combat options per round by 1 to increase the number of combat-usable non-combat options by the number of WoF rows while preserving the same choice load. That is a provably better exchange rate than other systems, almost all of them introduce combat-usable non-combat options at a 1:1 exchange rate with combat options for choice load.

I cannot stress this enough:

Who the fuck cares?

If people decide to evaluate the benefits of True Seeing while in combat, and also the other six to ten other utility powers without using heuristics, knowing that they do not contribute to combat the same way as the combat powers, then they are choosing to take a long time.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that WoF actually makes option paralysis way way worse, because after all, if you want to plan for next round at all you have to determine how the power you choose this round will interact with 36 additional powers, so your six powers this round have to be evaluated across 216 possible outcomes in weighted sets, and by golly if you want to plan out how your choice this round effects the next two rounds, why now, we have to evaluate 7776 possible outcomes.

I'm not going to do that, because if someone decides to go really in depth for the barest slimmest possibility of a slightly better choice, then they are going to do it in any system, and it's not the systems problem.

If your utility powers are not as good in combat as your combat powers, then you can have a pretty absurd number of them without it taking more than a few seconds to decide if they are worth using. If your utility powers are as good as combat powers, then they should be combat powers.

Your concern over increasing decision options with utility powers is a problem of power design for an at will system, not a problem of the system.

Wall of Stone is a great utility spell, and a great combat spell. But that's because it greats a giant fucking huge wall. If Wall of Stone creates only a very small wall on the first round, and can be channeled to do more each subsequent round, then you can have just as much (if not more) Castle building utility, without having it significantly effect your combat decisions.

So, At Will deals with utility powers better than WoF, because WoF has the inclusion problem, where utility powers either come at the direct cost of combat powers, or they have to be doubled up as combat powers as well (True Seeing is also lazor eyes) or they create dissonance when you have them not WoF accessed, or you increase complexity a lot when you add a second matrix for utility powers.

Obviously this problem is not insurmountable to a good game. But it is an issue which makes WoF utility harder to integrate than just giving AW characters as many utilities as you want, where the powers are designed to not take up space in the combat decisions of the PCs.

Yes Frank, WoF is not a bad system. It's probably even a good system. It's certainly better than Vancian Magic has been done. It might even be the best system for some types of games, particularly those with abstract positioning (since tactical positioning cannot then be used to differentiate the ideal power source round by round as well in such a system) or a game in which the enforced variety might be in theme of the game, such as a game focusing on non magical, especially melee characters, or specific types of mages.

No one here actually objects to WoF as a system being used for some games. What people object to is:

1) WoF proponents shunting every problem that WoF creates or exacerbates off to some other category and pretending that WoF has nothing to with it. IE "That's a problem of power design." "Totally easy to solve the problem of utility powers in WoF, here's six different methods that all have problems, and if you point out one of the problems, I'll point out how that's not a problem under some other method, and when you point out the problems with that one I'll switch back."

2) WoF proponents claiming straight out that it's trivially easy to solve all those problems they just shunted, but refuse to give any actual solutions to now. IE "Of course it's exactly as easy to make 36 distinct powers for each class that are all just as good and just as balanced and generally useful such that no column of the WoF will ever be particularly worse than any other. That's totally just as easy as making six powers that fit that criteria. And of course we won't end up pallet swapping. No, it's totally easy, I mean, not that I can name more than 12 powers right now, I can't be bothered to address that totally easy problem of designing more powers while keeping them as tactically interesting and equally as well balanced as the first twelve."

3) WoF proponents blowing every negative of every other system, even things that are not even negatives way the fuck out of proportion. IE "Option Paralysis sets in at 6 choices, and no one can handle more than that ever, and by golly that seventh choice brings you straight to 40 min turns, and kills the game." I could go on about how people blather on about option paralysis based on a few studies completely unrelated to the kinds of choices being made in an RPG, but I should also mention that the whole "If you have a script, the entire game is destroyed, and everyone will hate that so fucking much, even though the reason people have scripts is because they choose to use them." and "Heuristics are bad, because people make sub optimal choices that are still exactly as good as the results of WoF, but it's suddenly a huge problem when they do that themselves, even though it's not at all when we do it arbitrarily."

4) Special Lago only: Demanding everyone get on their knees and suck WoF's cock this instant, because it is unequivocally the best at everything, and if you even think about it and compare it to another system, why, that's blasphemy, and I will fucking eat your face which bowing to the meat spin of WoF. IE "WoF is clearly the best and only acceptable system for any fantasy heartbreaker, and I hate anyone who even thinks that any other system is acceptable, but because everyone is irrationally opposed to my beautiful awesome sweetheart who I love so much, clearly what needs to be done is we need to start with some other genre, like sci fi, and make the game, and then, once people have played it, they can't possibly disagree with me that WoF is the best and only system for anything ever, and they will put it in all their games!"