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

[DSMatticus]

WoF doesn't need separate powers for separate levels, powers can scale in effect with level (I can't see a single reason 4e didn't do this - the riders don't really get any better, they're just the same shit you did 10 levels ago with higher numbers). The matrix is never larger than 6x6, and that's pushing it.

You can have 100 powers per class and you could make almost 3 characters per class with no overlap, and that... I don't know how that compares to 4e, I haven't counted. But even a 100 per class would be excessive. Either way, with the same amount of powers 4e has, we could actually get more choice into the system (since you aren't choosing from the small subset of powers that are level-appropriate - ALL powers are level-appropriate).

[RadiantPhoenix]

Alternatively: existing 3e spells, with some possible re-leveling, plus metamagic.
If you wanted to preserve class identity you could limit certain columns to a shorter list of spells.

[Lago PARANOIA]

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

MGuy, you are totally confused here. I don't even really know where to start, but I'll give it a try.

1) We don't actually want to have generically overpowered moves in the game. All the same it happens. Yes, ideally, you wouldn't have overpowered moves at all but there's no one good enough to completely avoid making mistakes. That said, WoF absorbs overpowered moves better than other systems.

2) Ironically, effect + damage makes powers seem more samey than just doing a straight-up effect even though the diversity of moves is all the same. Or if that's too abstract, imagine if there was a law that dictated that every Nintendo DS game had in it programmed a copy of Tetris with a skin befitting the theme of the game. With just that change alone it makes all of the games feel more the samey even though aside from that the games have different gameplay.

What I'm trying to say is that this is yet another hasty assumption on your part, one that we've learned to avoid with 3E and 4E D&D.

3) Niche moves can be on a sliding scale of course. Tear Gas arrow is technically a niche arrow since a large portion of Monster Manual monsters don't have organic eyes and ears, but you have a pretty good chance of using it. Holy Water Arrow less so. Dog Whistle Arrow may come up like once a campaign, maybe. I'm not a fan of ultra-niche maneuvers, but because of the sliding scale or just plain ol' self-synergy it may behoove a particular character not to have any.

4) Palette Swap is still nebulously defined. What's the minimum amount of diversity between powers before they stop being palette swaps? I'm no one has trouble calling Sonic Orb a palette swap of Fire Orb, but it gets harder from then on. Is Suggestion a palette swap of Dominate Person? Is Dominate Person a palette swap of Charm Monster? Is Fireball a palette swap of Lightning Bolt?

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you think that the power size is unmanageable, you might want to look at this thread here: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52168

We never settled on anything definitive, but it's not like we're in the dark about to accomplish this goal.

[Josh_Kablack]

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

Awesome.

Please post how those work out when you get to them.

Unlike entirely too many people in this thread, I'm a lot more interested about how WoF works in actual gameplay than in rehashing old arguments over hypotheticals.

[Koumei]

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

Firstly, no, I wish I was.

Secondly, I specifically said this would be for a Magical Girls game. So it's almost always 4-5 PCs vs 1 enemy. Sure, you could theoretically have huge battles where it falls apart, but I don't much care in the same way nobody really cares that playing as Gods in D&D doesn't work.

[*]Each PC doesn't particularly care about conditions on other PCs unless they specifically want to heal them - such moves can just work, no special requirements. So unless you are actually unable to act, it doesn't matter what is going on, you can always use a heal power to remove a status effect. You only care about the conditions of two people when you heal (you and your target)
[*]When you attack the enemy, you only care about its conditions and your own - if you have X conditions then you can't do Y moves. At all. If the enemy has B conditions then you are able to use C moves you normally can't. You only care about the conditions of two people (you and the target)
[*]When the enemy attacks you, the same is basically true. You only care about the conditions of two people (you and the attacker)

Now yes, if one person is awesome at anti-air, they really want the enemy to be in the air, so will probably ask allies to knock it into the air/not smack it prone. But if that's a big deal, then I have to say we have a problem with D&D because the Rogue needs to say "Hey, stay there so I get flanking!" So really, any given player need only pay attention to their own conditions, and those of the enemy. And if they want to heal, they pay attention to those of the party/ask "is anyone Stunned?"

The MC will have to take note of all PCs and the monster, true, and yes that's a bit of a pain, but he can surely just go "Okay, I can do these moves at all" whenever his condition changes, then say "And I think I want this move, so let's see if there are any viable targets". The MC usually has extra book keeping, and this type of game would mean there isn't a group of 7 goblins with their own Init and HP.

I know I mentioned moves being more effective in certain states, but I don't want small bullshit modifiers so that bit was clearly wrong. Probably most non-super attacks would have the same attack bonus and damage, just with different conditions and requirements - and then we scrap the "super effective" bit, it's simply "It only works if they meet the conditions". There are no +/-1 type things to add up, you just have your plain old attack value rolled against their defence value. Or maybe you have super effective moves auto-hit or something, which is probably okay if they're just doing bits of damage and bouncing status effects around until the Super is ready.

Like playing 4th edition where all accounting had to be maintained in fucking triplicate because you needed to sum your bullshit +1-+3 bonuses and penalties for Scissors, Rocks, and Paper maneuvers separately.

Even not including that I agree I need to scrap the idea of bonuses and penalties, conditions just say what you can do/be hit by, I don't see it being that hard. I refuse to believe I'm a mathematical genius - I suck at math - so if I can handle it just fine, and keep track of a bunch of things, I'm pretty sure everyone else can.

I mean, you can just have a token on your sheet with a colour. It's there for everyone to see. So if you have Fatigue, Stupid and Tangle, you have blue, red and green tokens. You then look at your movelist. There is a column to the left which has colours shown, and that means "if you have this colour you can't do this move", and to the right it has other colours, meaning "your enemy has to have these colours for you to do this move". The actual description of the move will say what status effects it causes, with those effects written in their colour for ease of memory.

if they just put all their discretionary bonuses in Paper and used Paper Chain over and over again that they could consistently maintain a high enough Paper modifier that it wouldn't fucking matter what bullshit temporary disincentives there were to using Paper on a round by round basis.

It is my intention that such a system would not have discretionary bonuses you can choose to put in certain classes of move. They all have the same bonus, it's just that you might choose to take more "only works on prone foes" or "dazes enemy" moves.

Keeping track of relative positions between characters sounds cool, but I don't think it's a workable model outside of a duel.

Keep in mind that there really aren't relative positions in this model. It's simply "You are Prone/Standing/Aerial" for actual positions. You being in the air doesn't actually have any effect on how high your opponent is. There aren't any flanking, side-attacks or surrounding.

Please tell me where I'm horribly wrong in this, because for the type of game I would be aiming for (magical girl gang-up brawls) I don't see a real problem.

[Username17]

Please tell me where I'm horribly wrong in this

No problem.

What you just described is a situation with almost no tactical variation at all. Sailor Vulcan use Nail Set until the enemy (singular) has a red chip and then uses Hammerfall until the battle ends. Every. Single. Time.

Single enemies in such a scenario wouldn't really present much of a tactical variation unless they were adding and removing several chips from themselves every round. And if they were doing that, it would not only be a huge hassle, but it would also basically leave players with even less ability to plan long-term than they would if they were rolling a WoF die every turn. Because the tokens that each individual player is adding or removing from the enemy would by necessity be pretty much meaningless in the light of the state reshuffle the bad guy was doing to itself every turn.

What you're trying to do is have something be predictable and random at the same time. That's an incredibly narrow line to walk. If the results of the state changes are too deterministic, you're back to simple scripting. If the state changes are too unpredictable you haven't gained anything over just rolling a damn die.

But on top of that, if you simply go for "mother-may-I" tags, then once you get to the "Yes You May" part, you're in ability spam territory. Sailor Vulcan will always use Hammerfall once the red chip is in play, and will only use something else when the red chip leaves play. Essentially you're producing a WoF type set of ability restrictions where you're handing out one or more rows to choose from each turn. Which puts much harsher constraints on row length than handing out rows one at a time, but also is more vulnerable to move spam - since having a favorite move in any row is going to overwrite all other move possibilities much more often than would happen if rows came up one at a time.

---

Back to the original question: I think Super Heroes is probably the best setup to produce something like this. Because people know that Green Arrow literally works this way, in-genre. And that means that the people who sputter and moan about how it is not "realistic" that they can't use their super attack whenever they want to even though they can't do that in any system worth mentioning and also no character in any fiction or historical setting does that either would be at least a little bit quieter.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Well, fair enough then I suppose. I guess I may as well just pick a side if that would just end up "random yet not random" and, hating having dice or, worse, some cards, telling me what I can and can't do, I'll stick with "you can just use your powers whenever, and people might spam their best ones over and over. Oh well."

[PhoneLobster]

But on top of that, if you simply go for "mother-may-I" tags, then once you get to the "Yes You May" part, you're in ability spam territory.

And ironically that is objectively better than asking a dice the same question every round.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So I gotta ask, what are peoples' stone-cold objection towards having the dice giving them an array of options? I mean, you heard it folks, people would rather spam a small array of unchanging abilities under the guise of choice. That makes me wonder two things. First, what's so good about choice in the first place? Secondly, is it the lack of choice that people object to or is it having it pointed out to them that makes people angry since you can point to a bunch of other game mechanics that reduce player choice that don't get so much resistance.

[Koumei]

A little of both. Yes, in 4E you can write a script to handle your actions, but with WoF you can too: "I do whatever the die says I do". If you don't see the good thing about choice, I don't see how we can communicate here. You're only there to roll the dice, not have any real input. We have enough of the RNG fucking with us, and trying to overcome this (through re-rolls, bonuses big enough to slide off the RNG), that we really don't need any more.

I mean, note that in 3E, your average real character has a bunch of options they can choose to use, often with either all of them being good, just in slightly different ways (Fort vs Stun or Fort vs Nausea) or situationally better (targeting different Saves, various effects like Illusions), and they don't have some RNG sitting there and telling them what to do.

[RobbyPants]

So I gotta ask, what are peoples' stone-cold objection towards having the dice giving them an array of options? I mean, you heard it folks, people would rather spam a small array of unchanging abilities under the guise of choice. That makes me wonder two things. First, what's so good about choice in the first place? Secondly, is it the lack of choice that people object to or is it having it pointed out to them that makes people angry since you can point to a bunch of other game mechanics that reduce player choice that don't get so much resistance.

I can't speak for everyone, but some of the objection comes from your repeated claim that it's the bestest system evur, rather than it being a system with it's own pros and cons.

I personally don't mind the system and would like to see it tested, but I don't so much see it as "better", but "different".

[hogarth]

So I gotta ask, what are peoples' stone-cold objection towards having the dice giving them an array of options?

There was a whole thread about this. I'm not sure what the point is on rehashing all those arguments again in this thread.

But if I had to narrow my reservations down to one issue, it'd be this: Merely adding randomness to a character's abilities doesn't always make an encounter more interesting; in some cases it clearly would make an encounter less interesting.

[MGuy]

So I gotta ask, what are peoples' stone-cold objection towards having the dice giving them an array of options? I mean, you heard it folks, people would rather spam a small array of unchanging abilities under the guise of choice. That makes me wonder two things. First, what's so good about choice in the first place? Secondly, is it the lack of choice that people object to or is it having it pointed out to them that makes people angry since you can point to a bunch of other game mechanics that reduce player choice that don't get so much resistance.

I can't speak for everyone, but some of the objection comes from your repeated claim that it's the bestest system evur, rather than it being a system with it's own pros and cons.

I personally don't mind the system and would like to see it tested, but I don't so much see it as "better", but "different".

+1. That and your belief that rolling to cut out your choices is somehow inherently better than the player doing that for themselves.

[DSMatticus]

WoF in a nutshell, pro's and con's:

1) It kills option paralysis. Players can meaningful juggle like 36 abilities at a time without it getting unmanageable.

2) It varies combat round by round. This may not be meaningful variation, sadly. There's no reason to believe it adds tactical depth, in some cases it just means writing a script with a few "if (random_number == x) then {...}" statements. In conjunction with a list of abilities that feature heavy situational variability, it can encourage their use by helpfully reminding players they have them (by killing option paralysis). Of course, it may also just force you to have 3-6 defaults instead of 1 default, which is probably still better, but not necessarily good.

3) No, it does not rob you of player agency. What player agency? Robbed from where? If you're playing a CCG, does not being able to use your deck as your hand rob you of player agency? "Lightning bolt is in there somewhere! Why can't I use it?" There is also player agency in building the matrix. This is an annoying argument that I don't get - you might as well whine wizards run out of level 9 spells. That 'robs' player agency too.

4) WoF can be massively dissociative. Or it can not be. I can devise WoF systems that are actually pretty comfortable for me - they involve a combination of a matrix with 2-3 'held charges,' so basically you're either picking from a store of powers you have held in reserve OR what you rolled on the matrix. (It's a combination of the matrix's strengths and the deck's strengths.) And this is fairly associative, because combat is partly random. The matrix roll represents combat opportunity and heat of the moment action. The reserve represents deliberate action on the part of a character to try and use an ability.

But yes, in general, WoF can be dissociative and some (i.e. me) might say that's bad for roleplaying.

And this is really it. There's not a lot more to add to the discussion beyond, Lago's, "I love it and want to have its babies," or Lobster's "Send it to the depths of hell and be done with it." It is a mechanic with its own pro's and con's, and here they are in recap:
Pro's: no option paralysis, more turn-by-turn variety.
Con's: dissociative, may not actually add tactical depth depending on how good the rest of your combat system is.

[Username17]

If you don't see the good thing about choice, I don't see how we can communicate here.

Uh... you suggested a game mechanic that accurately represented first season Sailor Moon and its imitators where magical girls spam Move A until the enemy presents as vulnerable to the finishing move and then use Move B (the finishing move) and win the battle. Now you offered the people a "choice" I suppose, but the choice is merely to press the attack button or not. That's not even a game, it's a fucking die rolling exercise attached to a deterministic narrative.

Getting a set of six different choices to choose from each turn is still getting six things to choose from. At any level of option paralysis, the guy who just got a WoF result has the same number of real choices as the guy who has access to his "entire" move list. The limit on how many options to give people to choose from on a turn by turn basis is based on their ability to interact with lists, not by the resource management rubric. The WoF character only gets 1/6th of his abilities to choose from each turn, but he gets six times as many abilities total.

The number of options I would give a player on a turn by turn basis does not increase when you take the WoF away. The number of total abilities on the character sheet decreases.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Huh; a specialist wizard won't have 6 spell slots of their highest level until level 20; pearls of power don't increase the number of options beyond this because they only allow you to recover spells, not to prepare different ones.
Clerics and druids aren't any better at this, and sorcerers won't even get past 3, so a 6 column WoF matrix does, in fact, generally give you more good options than the existing system.

[Previn]

Getting a set of six different choices to choose from each turn is still getting six things to choose from. At any level of option paralysis, the guy who just got a WoF result has the same number of real choices as the guy who has access to his "entire" move list.

Uh... no? In a poorly designed system the number of meaningful choices may be limited so you only have say 6 our of 36, or 2 our of 36 or whatever. In a well designed system you could have 20 out of 36 meaningful choices, or 30 out of 36.

You citing that WoF has the 'same number of real choices' isn't based on any facts at all, it's based on an idealized view of WoF, and a tainted view of pretty much everything else. I agree that in theory WoF has more apparent real choices, but again, that just because of the poor design that you're comparing it to.

The WoF character only gets 1/6th of his abilities to choose from each turn, but he gets six times as many abilities total.

Explain this please? I'm not understanding what your trying to say.

The number of options I would give a player on a turn by turn basis does not increase when you take the WoF away. The number of total abilities on the character sheet decreases.

Again, only in a poorly designed system. WoF as far as I can tell isn't actually a fix for the underlying issues, it's a work around to doing the actual work of creating a good system and abilities.

[DSMatticus]

In a well designed system you could have 20 out of 36 meaningful choices, or 30 out of 36.

See earlier in the thread. It's called option paralysis. By the time you have 20 meaningful choices or 30 meaningful choices, you are not really considering them all. And if you never consider them, they stop being choices. Not to mention, a serious consideration of 20-30 abilities per round is so terrible it should not be endorsed. Nobody could play that shit, it would take forever.

The WoF character only gets 1/6th of his abilities to choose from each turn, but he gets six times as many abilities total.

Explain this please? I'm not understanding what your trying to say.

This is in reference to the fact that in order to prevent option paralysis, we have to limit the abilities a character gets per turn. D&D does this with spell-levels - almost always, you consider your top two spell levels. If you run out, you move down. Your top two spell levels are seriously probably 6-8 different spells put together. That is a small number. It does the same thing WoF does, except it makes you "outgrow" old abilities so you don't use them as much.

Again, only in a poorly designed system. WoF as far as I can tell isn't actually a fix for the underlying issues, it's a work around to doing the actual work of creating a good system and abilities.

Then you don't know what the underlying issues are, which is that characters with 30 abilities at a time:
A) Never fully consider all their abilities, but rather default to the ones they are familiar with, and
B) take a longer time to make decisions when they do deviate

It is just a fact of the human brain that you cannot handle having 30 options at once without some sort of shortcuts, and those shortcuts are going to omit possibilities implicitly and automatically. This results in completely deterministic play strategies, and what's worse, if a player tries to deviate from their play strategy, it takes them forever to sort through their abilities for the good ones.

There is no such thing as 30 meaningful choices. Give them all the 'good abilities' you want, but by the time the player has 30 of them they are not going to be able to evaluate them all at the same time, and they are going to default to a small handful 90% of the time and slow the game down the other 10% of the time. (See: the wizard who looks through his whole spell list every few rounds. Come on, we've all played with that guy. He slows shit down, you and I know it.)

[Previn]

In a well designed system you could have 20 out of 36 meaningful choices, or 30 out of 36.

See earlier in the thread. It's called option paralysis. By the time you have 20 meaningful choices or 30 meaningful choices, you are not really considering them all. And if you never consider them, they stop being choices. Not to mention, a serious consideration of 20-30 abilities per round is so terrible it should not be endorsed. Nobody could play that shit, it would take forever.

That was an example number. You could hit whatever the 'magic number' is for a well designed system. My point is that if 6 meaningful choices every round is what you want, you can do that without WoF if you design a good system.

I'm not talking about option paralysis, I'm talking about not making up non-sense statements like "the guy who just got a WoF result has the same number of real choices as the guy who has access to his "entire" move list." which is pretty much unsupportable opinion.

This is in reference to the fact that in order to prevent option paralysis, we have to limit the abilities a character gets per turn.

You don't actual have to do that, you just have to make it clear when situations make some abilities better than others, which you can do with good design and a solid system.

Then you don't know what the underlying issues are, which is that characters with 30 abilities at a time:
A) Never fully consider all their abilities, but rather default to the ones they are familiar with, and
B) take a longer time to make decisions when they do deviate

Ok, to make this really, really clear because I know how Den posters like to grab pointless things and run with it: 30 IS A COMPLETELY MADE UP NUMBER TO DEMONSTRATE A POINT. Figure out what you think the optimal number is and put some work in and you can get that many meaningful options, and if you're good, you can do it while making it relatively clear when to use what.

It is just a fact of the human brain that you cannot handle having 30 options at once without some sort of shortcuts, and those shortcuts are going to omit possibilities implicitly and automatically. This results in completely deterministic play strategies, and what's worse, if a player tries to deviate from their play strategy, it takes them forever to sort through their abilities for the good ones.

The ability to sort through choices isn't that difficult if they're designed right. If your choices are do x, y or z damage in way a, b, c,d or e. The yes, you're going to hit problems. But again, that's generally an example of bad design. WoF doesn't actually solve that. It just makes sure you arbitrarily do you x in way a one round, and y damage in way b the next round.

There is no such thing as 30 meaningful choices. Give them all the 'good abilities' you want, but by the time the player has 30 of them they are not going to be able to evaluate them all at the same time, and they are going to default to a small handful 90% of the time and slow the game down the other 10% of the time. (See: the wizard who looks through his whole spell list every few rounds. Come on, we've all played with that guy. He slows shit down, you and I know it.)

And again, just make sure every is really, really clear on this: 30 IS A COMPLETELY MADE UP NUMBER TO DEMONSTRATE A POINT. Figure out what you think the optimal number is make that many abilities. If it's 6, do 6. If it's 12 do 12. If it's 20, do 20.

I could do 6 different abilities standing on my head. 12 might be a little tough, 20 would be hard, but still doable. Again, my point/opinion is that WoF isn't actually a fix for the underly problem of badly designed powers/abilities or too many or too meaningless powers, it's a patch to cover it up without actually addressing it.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I think that there's some variation in how everyone views a Green-Arrow style Winds of Fate matrix.

Here's how Frank's latest description sounds to me:
n is the number of meaningful options someone can consider, m is the number of sets of abilities you generate

1	ability 1	ability 2	...	ability n
2	ability n+1	ability n+2	...	ability 2n
...	...	...	...	...
m	ability (m-1)*n+1	ability (m-1)*n+2	...	ability m*n

He then compares it to:

all the time

ability 1

ability 2

...

ability n

which is a WoF matrix with only one row, which is functionally equivalent to "all your abilities are at-will"

At which point, yes, obviously the WoF guy has 'm' times more abilities, yet only has to consider as many abilities at a time as the one-row guy when deciding which ability to use.

Other people compare like this (both variables are the same):

1	ability 1	ability 2	...	ability n/m
2	ability n/m+1	ability n/m+2	...	ability 2n/m
...	...	...	...	...
m	ability (1-1/m)*n+1	ability (1-1/m)*n+2	...	ability n

all the time

ability 1

ability 2

...

ability n

From this comparison, of course, it is obvious that the second guy has a better array of options (n having been defined as the optimal number of choices to give someone)

I hope this is helpful.

[DSMatticus]

You don't actual have to do that, you just have to make it clear when situations make some abilities better than others, which you can do with good design and a solid system.

No, this is a false solution. The typical person can evaluate between 6-12 options at a time before they overload. There is no 'clear' anything when that number goes past 12, and if your idea is that people will just 'heuristically' weed out the bad options and be left choosing between the handful of good ones they can manage, psychology would like to point out you are wrong with factual studies.

Also, since when did option paralysis become a band? This is getting impossible to google. It has some other name I can't think of right now. But the point is, yes. People make bad decisions when they have lots of options (even if lots of those options are bad), and they take longer time to bad those decisions.

"6" is the magic number you referred to earlier in the post. 6 is the meaningful number of choices you should have every round. Which means if you don't have a resource management system, 6 abilities on your character sheet.

"the guy who just got a WoF result has the same number of real choices as the guy who has access to his "entire" move list."

And that's why that is a true statement. Because the guy who has his entire move list, if it's bigger than 6-12, has no idea what to do with it. He will either take a very long time, or default, or do something else 'bad.'

Winds of Fate allows you to have those 6 meaningful choices at a time, but still have 36 abilities on your character sheet with a 6x6 matrix. Which is its point - it defeats option paralysis while allowing for a huge number of abilities.

The ability to sort through choices isn't that difficult if they're designed right.

Scientific studies have shown us that it is difficult, and I'll edit a link in later, but I should probably get back to my CSE lab at this instant. You're free to google the phenomenon yourself or consult the old threads.

Summary
6-12 is the magic number. Anything more than that (and 30 is more) is bad to have at a time. That means, if you want all abilities available all the time, that you can have 6-12 on your character sheet before your mental algorithms start to fail and you either slow down or apply heuristics without really considering each option.

WoF lets you take that 6-12 and multiply it by any number you want, and have that on your character sheet instead.

Situational clues are a bad idea because they don't actually work unless there is a clear power-tagging system (these are fire powers, use on water enemies; these are sneaky powers, use on unaware enemies). As in each power has the descriptor "fire" and "sneaky." And even then, it's seriously not a good idea. What happens when you have an unaware water enemy? That's twice as many options to consider. What happens when you could attack a water enemy, OR attack an enemy sneakily (this will probably happen a lot).

Step 1) Evaluate active situations for which you have tags.
Step 2) For each situation corresponding to a tag you have, evaluate each power with that tag.
Step 3) Pick.

You will break your limit of 6 routinely and regularly and the system won't work if there are 36 abilities on the character sheet with 6 different tags (corresponding to a 6x6 Wof matrix, except you can use whatever).

[Previn]

There is no 'clear' anything when that number goes past 12, and if your idea is that people will just 'heuristically' weed out the bad options and be left choosing between the handful of good ones they can manage, psychology would like to point out you are wrong with factual studies.

See, this is where your entire line of reasoning falls apart.

There don't need to be "bad" options. If you do have bad options, you've already failed as a designer and WoF is just going to maybe cover up the problem.

And yes, you can make clear distinctions among good options that are relatively quick and easy. In example:

- Basic Attack: deals 5d6 damage to the target
- Whirlwind: Deals 3d6 damage to every target you can reach
- Push: deals 2d6 damage and moves a foe 10' in a direction of your choice
- Engage: deals 3d6 damage and prevents the target from moving
- Distract: deals 2d6 damage and grants allies a bonus 2d6 damage on attacks
- Finish him: deals 8d6 to the target, you can't attack next turn
- Withdraw: deal 3d6 damage to the target and then move up to 20' away without provoking AoO
- Defender: deal 4d6 damage and attacks against you do d6 less damage
- Setup: deal 3d6 damage to a target, gain a bonus to hit on your next attack
- Second Wind: Recover 4d6 damage
- Quick Bandage: Ally recovers 3d6 damage
- Command: Give up your attack to have an ally make an Attack (the 5d6 one)

Now, that's a quick and dirty 12 sample options for a fighter type dude, most deal damage in varying amounts, but there isn't an über move you'd just spam. Basic Attack is going to be used more, but only if nothing else presents itself. If we were to actually layout a system we could check the math and test to make these all scale as well, and relatively easily add in few more powers without hit any of the issues that WoF supposedly takes care of.

This gives you a lot of options that change depending on the situation while still allowing you to look at the list and pretty easily pick out what's going to be good right then with a minimal amount of effort, because there are clear uses of most of those. Writing a script would be pretty difficult for it as well.

Now, granting that this is a simplistic example, how would slapping the above powers into a 3x6 WoF matrix be an improvement?

Winds of Fate allows you to have those 6 meaningful choices at a time, but still have 36 abilities on your character sheet with a 6x6 matrix. Which is its point - it defeats option paralysis while allowing for a huge number of abilities.

I have yet to see anything for a WoF matrix that isn't essentially a couple utility abilities, and then Attack A, Attack B, Attack C etc.... wether I do 5d6 fire or 5d6 ice damage for 7d6 normal damage isn't really a meaningful choice if I can only ever do 1 and which determination is random. In fact it doesn't really matter if you can cram 20 minor variations of the same attack in a WoF matrix because you've just designed 19 bad attacks rather than 19 good ones, or 12 good ones, or 6 good ones, or whatever.

So again, all I see WoF doing is letting you make a lot of bad abilities and then forcing players to randomly use them rather than making good abilities in a good system. I don't see any reason to assume that all of the abilities in WoF matrix are going to to be good or even necessarily easy to choose between.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There don't need to be "bad" options. If you do have bad options, you've already failed as a designer and WoF is just going to maybe cover up the problem.

We mean situationally bad. Fireball is a classic spell, but it's almost bad option in the context of fighting salamanders no matter how good it is in that particular edition.

Unless combat is static almost every power will become situationally bad. If a Barbarian is getting harassed by goblins across the chasm, 5 of his 7 powers (suited for melee) become 'bad' and he has to evaluate whether Whirlwind Throw or Power Roar is better. Whirlwind Throw might be better if the goblins don't have cover and there's a mess of 'em. Power Roar might be better if there's a goblin healer or mezzer. Who knows.

I have yet to see anything for a WoF matrix that isn't essentially a couple utility abilities, and then Attack A, Attack B, Attack C etc.... wether I do 5d6 fire or 5d6 ice damage for 7d6 normal damage isn't really a meaningful choice if I can only ever do 1 and which determination is random. In fact it doesn't really matter if you can cram 20 minor variations of the same attack in a WoF matrix because you've just designed 19 bad attacks rather than 19 good ones, or 12 good ones, or 6 good ones, or whatever.

There's that 'WoF Matrix requires palette swap moves' canard again.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Previn, that's seriously way too much shit to have in one turn for the average player or new player and that's like a low-level 4E martial-sourced character of complexity.