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

[Koumei]

Come to think of it, was it even a fucking big deal before 4E came along? We all agree that 4E is awful for a variety of reasons, but I can't remember people saying, in the days of 3E, that we need to have a deck of cards to determine our abilities for us. I seem to recall Wizards being just fine at knowing 843 spells, memorising a dozen of them, then using 2-3 of those in a given fight without doing too much doubling up.

Were people clamouring for this before 4E and I just can't remember it, or is it just a reactionary thing to the badness of that? If it is, then I remind you that is stupid. It was bad, but it needn't be important enough to change our way of thinking.

I for one am totally fine with the Sphere system, the Wizard and so on, and don't need an RNG there to try fucking me at every step.

And for what it's worth, I was thinking more late season Sailor Moon + the manga, where everyone has a whole bunch of attacks - Mercury could have good reason to start off blinding the enemy with bubbles, then using ice bubbles to slow it, then hitting it with a vacuum cutter to damage it and end the "it's hard to target individual foes in the bubbles" effect (or use the lock-on of her visor) before smacking it with a shine aqua illusion or two. It's just that the choice of status effect is what leads them to say what they're doing, rather than the d6 or the deck of cards telling them what to do.

And when you roll that d6, even if each number does let you use 6 different things, either they're still basically the same (in which case you may as well just have a whole bunch of near-identical powers people can choose from) or they aren't and one is clearly superior so they choose that (which they don't need an RNG to help them do).

[DSMatticus]

There don't need to be "bad" options.

There need to be situationally bad options. Or rather, in some situations, some options need to be better than others. Lago said this already, so I'll just leave it be at that.

And your list is... problematic. The option paralysis is palpable. That is a situation that is hard for a single person to evaluate. There are way too many conditions to track.

"Am I surrounded in melee? Whirlwind does 3d6 per target."
"Am I being attacked significantly by ranged opponents? Defender would help me."
"Is the target between 6d6-8d6 from death? Finish him is good."
"Is there a terrain obstacle I can take advantage? How many pushes would it take, and how much damage does that do? Does that beat my best other option?"
"Is an enemy about to run that I don't want to? Engage."
"How many allies are about to attack a target? Distract is good if the number * 2d6 is better than my best attack option."
"How high is the bonus on setup? Is the accuracy bonus, weighted, worth the reduction in damage?"

Have I covered even half of them yet? Slightly over half? How many questions did I have to ask? A lot.

And the problem is (counter-intuitively) that they are almost all going to be good options in certain situations, some more than others. Shortcutting heuristics are ineffectual, because there's no good rules of thumb. So we end up with either defaulting or brute force evaluation (time consuming, slows down gameplay).

@Koumei
Hm. Wizards in 3.5 have always been problematic for certain players. Not everyone, but I'm not convinced everyone gets the most of them, either. They tend to either take awhile, or restrict themself to looking at their remaining spells in descending order until they find something they like. And obviously, the wizard resource management system doesn't really work for fighters. It's... sort of silly. But you can have something like ToB, preparing a one row WoF matrix.

4e had a lot to do with it - D&D finally broke the Vancian mold, which you have to admit is probably good. But at the same time, they did it and sucked at it. So we started looking for ways to make it better, to handle just 'having all your abilities at once' and not going absolutely mad trying to contain the head-exploding amounts of decision-making that would entail. WoF is one way to do that.

It's not a tactical thing. It's just a, "we want lots of abilities. We want non-Vancian resource management. How do we do this?"

[MGuy]

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.

What? In the proposed WoF system you will have at least more abilities than that (to fill out your matrix) and be expected to know all of them. Further you then expect players to round by round assess and reassess their choices so that they choose the best outcome. You proposed yourself that by trying something new people will take longer to assess it. How is having those abilities splayed out like that any worse?

[DSMatticus]

be expected to know all of them

Whoa whoa whoa. There is a difference between knowing and deciding - those are entirely two different mental algorithms. There is a limit on how much you can expect a character to remember (or want to look up at a time), but that is a different and separate problem from the limit on how many things you can expect any given person to choose between reasonably.

You're talking about the wrong thing there, no offense.

Further you then expect players to round by round assess and reassess their choices so that they choose the best outcome.

When the number of decisions to make is small, choices are made quicker.

How is having those abilities splayed out like that any worse?

I'm going to apply science of the computational variety!

Okay, this is a simple and efficient algorithm for deciding between N things. Declare the first 'thing' to be the best, and then compare the 2nd through N things with the best thing. When you find something better, replace and continue. (This is probably a more efficient algorithm than the one our brains use, in honesty.) As you can guess, the amount of time that algorithm takes is linearly proportional to the number of things. If you have 4 things, it will take 4 units of time. If you have 8 things, it will take 8 units of time.

So, let's take Previn's guy who has 12 abilities or so (and all of them are pretty good, really). He has to find the best thing of those 12 every round, which means he's spending 12 units of time per round. And also, let's take a WoF guy with a 3x4 matrix, meaning he has access to 4 abilities at a time, but 12 abilities on his character sheet. He has to find the best thing of the 4 options he has every round, which means he's spending 4 units of time per round.

A 5-round combat with the first guy will involve him taking 60 units of time. A 5-round combat with the second guy will involve him taking 20 units of time.

See what's happening there? We made a huge cut in the amount of time that guy is spending per turn. I mean, it has its trade-offs. He only has access to 4 of his 12 abilities at a time, instead of all 12, but he's still making decisions, and combat is going to be way faster, and there's less chance he'll get frustrated trying to compare 12 things at once and say, "fuck it, basic attack." So all in all, I would consider that a win with respect to this part of the argument. (Emphasized because WoF's totally have downsides, I just think this is one area where they excel.)

[Username17]

Come to think of it, was it even a fucking big deal before 4E came along? We all agree that 4E is awful for a variety of reasons, but I can't remember people saying, in the days of 3E, that we need to have a deck of cards to determine our abilities for us. I seem to recall Wizards being just fine at knowing 843 spells, memorising a dozen of them, then using 2-3 of those in a given fight without doing too much doubling up.

Wizards in 3e have a sharply tired approach to spells, where the higher level spells are significantly superior to the lower level ones. Players only generally consider their top two spell levels for as long as they are available. This isn't hundreds of spells, it's like 6. Which functions. When players attempt to consider all of their spells, they freeze up and the game grinds to a halt. Players who don't grasp the sorting algorithm of "only use your high level shit" slow the game to a crawl.

In 4e you actually have many fewer powers. In fact, you only have like 10 (it maxes out at like 17 at the highest levels that people don't actually play at). But the game still grinds to a halt because there isn't a strong connection between the level of an ability and the strength of it. So the player sorts through 10 powers or so every round, and that slows the game down unreasonably.

The key is that people actually suck ass at making decisions that are both good and fast out of large numbers of choices. And "large" is actually only like nine. AD&D and 3e D&D kept people with system mastery from paralyzing the game by giving people a very simple sorting algorithm for their abilities that made almost all of their "choices" completely fake. And by doing that, it kept the number of "real" choices to a number you could count on your fingers. But if you want to give people more "real" abilities, you're going to have to do something to hack the round-by-round decision making back down to a reasonable number.

4e showed us that increasing the number of round by round "real" choices from 6 to 10 was too many, even if you dumbed the game down to the point where none of the choices did anything especially non-standard and the choices did not change from combat to combat.

The people who are advocating all abilities at-will are essentially arguing that 3e Wizards shouldn't have lower level spell slots at all.

-Username17

[Koumei]

I don't have problems with choosing between a bunch of good powers quickly - I just say "I need something that does something along the lines of X, great, I pick this one, because it does that" and later on I can use a different one.

And I don't think I'm particularly bright. So are people really unable to decide well and that's just my Idiot Savant skill? Or is that just a load of balls and most people who get taught how a game works will be just fine?

[PhoneLobster]

And I don't think I'm particularly bright. So are people really unable to decide well and that's just my Idiot Savant skill? Or is that just a load of balls and most people who get taught how a game works will be just fine?

It's the second one.

Option paralysis happens. But it isn't really a big deal. The vast majority of players don't have a serious problem with it. Further, the vast majority of players would PREFER to face the dreadful and terrrrrrrible risk of spending an extra few seconds thinking about an option rather than just plain not having it.

Those few players that genuinely suffer from option paralysis do NOT in fact suffer more with more options, and the threshold for option paralysis with really fucking stupid players is seriously ONE OPTION. No really. The players Frank and Lago want to take everyone else's options away to benefit are the same guys who sit there gazing into space with their mouth hanging open for five minutes when you offer them the option "Would you like to hit it with your sword?".

[Username17]

I don't have problems with choosing between a bunch of good powers quickly

Yes you do. Everyone does. You might not be aware of slowing the fucking game down, but if you actually evaluated a long list of decent options, you'd slow the game down. We have measured this, with clocks. Fuck you and your "I'm so special that computational limits of the human brain do not apply to me!" horse shit.

I just say "I need something that does something along the lines of X, great, I pick this one, because it does that" and later on I can use a different one.

So... your "big plan" is to use an incredibly simple sorting heuristic and then pick something at random? Well fuck a duck, that does sound fast. Also almost as efficient as randomly limiting the evaluated options to a manageable set and then performing a full tactical analysis on each.

And I don't think I'm particularly bright. So are people really unable to decide well and that's just my Idiot Savant skill? Or is that just a load of balls and most people who get taught how a game works will be just fine?

I'm going to go with just regular idiot. You are seriously arguing that the sorting algorithm of "Ah fuckit" is some sort of master tactical planning session. It's not. It's you abdicating tactical decision making to choose shit at random with unreflective snap decisions. That kind of punting is exactly the kind of poor heuristics that Lago was complaining about. Sorting your moves into "'I'm going to use an AoE attack, so I'll only check those" is no better than "I rolled a 3, so I'm going to only check the maneuvers on list 3". And on top of that, your own claim is that you are performing secondary sorting by just grabbing the first one that strikes your fancy. That's pathetic.

So no, you aren't a special snowflake, your own description of how awesome you are at making quick decisions is you describing one of the worst possible sorting systems. Seriously, we're only about one step better than "Use next ability listed alphabetically from the last ability used or restart from 'Abjure' if no abilities remain."

-Username17

[Koumei]

Oh fuck you, I said I look for the kind of effect I want ("Stuns an enemy, Nauseates an enemy, Dazes an enemy, Panics an enemy, KOs an enemy, Kills an enemy") and pick one that does that.

It's that simple. As long as they're all decent, the powers are all fine. Yeah, I skip over "Does some damage" and "Makes an enemy Shaken" and "Boosts your own saves", but it's easy to say "I want ___ effect" and scan the powers for ones that do ___ effect. And it works just fine. Even better when you actually have three other players and an MC, who each have a turn too. Then you have like 4-5 minutes between turns if, for whatever reason, you need more care than "This thing forces a ___ Save vs ___ debilitating condition that leaves them unable to fight back."

Now, maybe your proposed system doesn't have useful status effects so you can't actually look through your powers for the good ones, because there are none. But that's not actually my problem for being good at paying attention to which powers do good things, it's yours for emulating 4E.

[mean_liar]

In 4e you actually have many fewer powers. In fact, you only have like 10 (it maxes out at like 17 at the highest levels that people don't actually play at). But the game still grinds to a halt because there isn't a strong connection between the level of an ability and the strength of it. So the player sorts through 10 powers or so every round, and that slows the game down unreasonably.

This is, of course, completely subjective and neatly places itself into the realm of bullshit for coming from someone who hasn't actually played any 4eDnD.

What is an unreasonable amount of time to spend deciding an action for a round?

In a dynamic situation where you absolutely need to choose an action at the appropriate moment, with a table of five and a GM, let's say you ideally want a round of combat between peers executed and over in ten minutes. That's 100s per player to choose and resolve an action, something that no game will ever reliably achieve anyhow, even WoF.

If you want to speed up gameplay, eliminate tabletalk during combat. That'll have a more immediate impact on action resolution than WoF.

[Previn]

There don't need to be "bad" options.

There need to be situationally bad options. Or rather, in some situations, some options need to be better than others. Lago said this already, so I'll just leave it be at that.

And your list is... problematic. The option paralysis is palpable. That is a situation that is hard for a single person to evaluate. There are way too many conditions to track.

"Am I surrounded in melee? Whirlwind does 3d6 per target."
"Am I being attacked significantly by ranged opponents? Defender would help me."
"Is the target between 6d6-8d6 from death? Finish him is good."
"Is there a terrain obstacle I can take advantage? How many pushes would it take, and how much damage does that do? Does that beat my best other option?"
"Is an enemy about to run that I don't want to? Engage."
"How many allies are about to attack a target? Distract is good if the number * 2d6 is better than my best attack option."
"How high is the bonus on setup? Is the accuracy bonus, weighted, worth the reduction in damage?"

Er... that's not a difficult thing to figure out. Really, actually having to pay attention to the play area and make decisions is not a bad thing.

I dare you to provide a WoF matrix that I can't complain about having to check at least 9 things before making a decision. Heck if you have to check 12 things and can then decide (especially when you can yes/no a choice in less than 10 seconds), that's pretty awesomely easy if it's providing engaging play.

Heck, I track more than that when I'm driving a car. I can only imagine how impossible it must be to play video games like Street Fighter. Everyone standing around for 3 minutes before hitting a button, then pausing and considering everything for another 3 minutes... because they've got 20 moves, half of which are slight on the other half.

Again, provide a WoF matrix that we can compare to, and we'll see how well it holds up.

[hogarth]

Oh fuck you, I said I look for the kind of effect I want ("Stuns an enemy, Nauseates an enemy, Dazes an enemy, Panics an enemy, KOs an enemy, Kills an enemy") and pick one that does that.
[etc.]

According to a previous post of Frank's on the subject, you're playing the game wrong. You're supposed to cultivate a zen-like state where you have no opinion on what kind of attack you want to use before picking a power.

Because I'll give you a hint: if Green Arrow's player was given all two dozen arrows to select from every round, the player would still only give serious consideration to a handful of them when deciding his action for the turn. And round to round, the small handful that was being considered probably wouldn't change much.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I'm 100% in agreement. I'm just adding the addendum that your Green Arrow example doesn't change that; it just shuffles around the effects of those handful of arrows (not-very-lethal damage, lethal damage, entangle, etc.) a bit. From a player perspective, if I want to entangle Clock King, I don't care if I do it with a cable arrow or a net arrow or a glue arrow. Well, that's not quite true -- I might care in the sense that one does a shitty job compared to the other.

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. And after considering your options, you may decide that the best way to do that is with a movement debuff like a Glue Arrow, or with a general debuff like Flash Arrow, or with a damaging attack like a Boxing Glove or a DOT like a Gas Bomb Arrow. Or whatever.
[etc.]

[talozin]

When playing a Wizard, my usual approach is to make most of the decisions while other things are happening.

It actually does take a shitload of time to make efficient decisions about what order to cast things on your spell list. Fortunately, almost all of that time can be expended at places other than the gaming table. Your spell list doesn't change all the time, so if you do the analysis during your non-gaming hours, it's pretty reasonable to come up with a short and fairly efficient list of options for what to do depending on what you encounter. As long as you keep thinking about what you're going to do next round while the other players and the DM are taking their own actions, you can generally pick something reasonably efficient without taking forever and a day to do it. Not perfect, but reasonably efficient. Not always, but usually.

And that's okay, but it sounds an awful lot like work, because it is. I can do Wizard decision-making not because of my awesome computer-like intellect but because I spend a lot of additional time on it. Many people, especially people who're just learning the game or are just there to hang out with their buddies, are either not able to do that or not willing to. So I completely understand the desire to have a way to reduce that process to something that actual human beings can do without preparation. I don't know that I'd necessarily play a WoF wizard, but I totally get why someone might.

[Username17]

Oh fuck you, I said I look for the kind of effect I want ("Stuns an enemy, Nauseates an enemy, Dazes an enemy, Panics an enemy, KOs an enemy, Kills an enemy") and pick one that does that.

It's that simple.

That is fucking retarded. Seriously, that is a dreadful argument and you should be ashamed that you made it. Your sorting algorithm is to "only have good abilities" and then "use them at random". Are you fucking kidding me?

Yes, if all your abilities are "good enough to make you win" and you use them randomly without contemplation, then you will win. That observation is trivial. But your answer to "making tactical decisions takes too long when there are a lot of decisions" is to say "make the game easy enough that all decisions can be responded to flippantly and then respond to them all flippantly". That's... not even an answer.

Further, the vast majority of players would PREFER to face the dreadful and terrrrrrrible risk of spending an extra few seconds thinking about an option rather than just plain not having it.

Uh... depends on what you mean by "prefer". People prefer, when asked, to have more choices than to have less choices. However after the fact, people who had more choices are actually less happy than people who had less. This assuming that the number of total options doesn't fall below abut five.

But basically you're making the Republican Party of America argument. People would prefer to have their taxes lowered. Ask them, they will tell you that. Pretty much every time. But after the fact, they will be happier if taxes and services were higher. Psychological research has advanced a lot and merely asking people who don't understand probabalistic mechanisms what system they would like and then acting like their naive first ideas were made out of solid fucking gold is totally nutbar. If people's unexamined ideas of what game mechanics thy preferred were right, we'd still be playing Gygaxian D&D or Tunnels & Trolls, because that is what people's unexamined ideas of what they want actually look like.

-Username17

[Wrathzog]

If you want to speed up gameplay, eliminate tabletalk during combat. That'll have a more immediate impact on action resolution than WoF.

This, so badly.

Also, Cell Phones. I love it when a dude is playing Angry Birds or Surfing the Youtubes and then his turn comes up but you have to tell him that and then he puts his phone down and he looks at the board and his brow furrows slightly and then he looks at his power cards and then back at the board and then back at his power cards and then he asks a stupid question that he would know the answer to if he was ever paying attention and then looks back down at his cards and uses a fucking at-will and doesn't do a god damn useful thing with his turn.
Then he goes back to his phone.

Anyhow, if we want WoF to work, it absolutely needs to be paired up with a system that was designed, from the ground up, to be played with WoF. So, plopping it on top of 4E was a bad way to implement this because 4E is not going to support it properly (Psionics might be able to, I would look into this).
Creating the Crusader class and putting that into 3E was a good way to test it out.

As a Concept, WoF is good, but assuming that it can be applied to/over any game system is naive.

-e-

A 5-round combat with the first guy will involve him taking 60 units of time. A 5-round combat with the second guy will involve him taking 20 units of time.

No one else has said anything and I forgot to include this...
What's the overhead for the process that decides what powers the WoF guy has to use every round? Assuming a simple di roll and a table look up, 2-3 time units?

[Koumei]

Are you proposing that all eight trillion powers needed to support a 6x6 for each of 5 characters for the whole campaign be awesome, and thus the die roll is the same as making a flippant choice?

Or should a whole bunch be shit, so that some times the dice say "Fuck you"?

I mean, if it's the former, then I guess I'm okay with that as long as someone else is writing out all those powers. If it's the latter then no, I'd rather just flippantly choose in combat, having done all the "hard work" of choosing the good ones between game sessions.

[DSMatticus]

I don't have problems with choosing between a bunch of good powers quickly - I just say "I need something that does something along the lines of X, great, I pick this one, because it does that" and later on I can use a different one.

I'm gonna be less vitriolic than Frank about it, but you're wrong. I mean, you're right that this is a problem made evident by 4e, and this problem does not exist as strongly in 3.5. But that's because 3.5 provides you with simple heuristics: higher-level spells are more powerful, and the number of high-level spells you have access to is totally manageable. You don't consider every option. You may also have simple retrieving heuristics that match situations to specific spells, but you don't make a string of decisions based on the entire spell list per round, and if you did, 3.5 wizards would take forever.

4e doesn't have that "higher-level is stronger than lower-level" sorting algorithm, and it takes a longer time to make decisions even though you have less abilities overall. Seriously, 4e combat turns can take longer than a 3.5 wizard (until the player scripts himself) even though 4e characters have less overall abilities. And this is a profound observation, because it shows us what's slowing down combat: having lots of seemingly good decisions at once.

WoF totally fixes that. Now, it may not have been a big deal in the first place (this is entirely subjective, and likely situationally dependent), but if you're of the opinion, "man, combat takes forever," WoF will seriously reduce the time you spend for a game like 4e. Additionally, if you want a character to have 36 abilities on their character sheet and not lose their damn mind each and every round, WoF will let you do that.

What is an unreasonable amount of time to spend deciding an action for a round?

Please recognize that 'unreasonable' is the only part of that sentence that is sujbective. Having to sort through 10 powers instead of 6 powers is objectively slower, and there's no subjectivity in that.

Really, actually having to pay attention to the play area and make decisions is not a bad thing.

No, it isn't, but requiring a large number of decisions which actually give you the reverse of that. It will lead to two potential outcomes.
A) People will take longer during their turn. Your 12 list ability will do this, because each power is situationally good. They are fairly balanced in that regard. This means each power must be evaluated relative to the situation the player is in or the situation the player can put them.
B) People will get frustrated and default to their preferred attack method, like basic attack.

that I can't complain about having to check at least 9 things before making a decision. Heck if you have to check 12 things and can then decide

I don't know what the point of this is. Here's the relevant argument: Given a list of X abilities, show me an example where having them all at once will take less time to evaluate than having X/3 of them at once.

I can only imagine how impossible it must be to play video games like Street Fighter.

Yeah, professional tournie players for fighting games can count the number of moves they use on one or two hands. This is also a real-time system, so it's completely different. If you give people time, they will utilize it. If you don't give people time, they will apply heuristics and the decisions will be faster and more instinctive.

provide a WoF matrix that we can compare to, and we'll see how well it holds up.

I gave the math. A 12-list ability broken into a 3*4 WoF matrix takes 1/3rd the time to operate over and make a decision, and that's assuming your brain is using one of the better algorithms. It's actually quite slower.

What's the overhead for the process that decides what powers the WoF guy has to use every round? Assuming a simple di roll and a table look up, 2-3 time units?

What's the overhead for doing a front-of-list retrieval on your abilities? .5-1 time units? (I.e., how long does it take you to look at your page to get the next ability you're evaluating?)

Some of these values are negligible. I think 2-3 time units is rather high. Rolling a die and looking at a table takes as much time as evaluating three powers? I think not. These little constants are hidden everywhere, and while it's not really fair to ignore them in cases where we're talking about fixed quantities like 6 vs 12 (it actually turns out for small inputs, insertion sort, which is a very bad algorithm, is faster than quicksort, which is a very good algorithm), but we probably should ignore them anyway for simplicity unless you're convinced they add up, and I don't think they will.

eight trillion powers needed to support a 6x6 for each of 5

6*6*3*5=540. Five character classes with 3 times as many powers as the WoF matrix can hold (giving you three potentially completely unique characters by class), and you only need 540 powers. If you're not going to do Vancian magic, there's no need for higher-level powers at all. Powers should just improve with level, so there are significantly less of them. This is something 4e should have done from the very start, and it's silly that they didn't. The only thing that changes anyway is the numbers, the riders/scope aren't any better.

[Orion]

I can only imagine how impossible it must be to play video games like Street Fighter. Everyone standing around for 3 minutes before hitting a button, then pausing and considering everything for another 3 minutes... because they've got 20 moves, half of which are slight on the other half.

Are you really going there? Do you expect me to believe that Street Fighter players are notorious for making the right decision every time? No. There are two problems with having two many options. Sometimes you take too long to decide, and sometimes you make the wrong decision.

New players in fighting games do both all the time. First they pick like 5 moves that they like and try to use those exclusively. When they're forced into a situation where none of them apply, they freeze up and die.

More experienced players don't freeze and don't use the same 5 every time, but they don't make optimal decisions. They can reliably do a move rather than hesitating, and do a move which is vaguely appropriate--fast if it needs to be fast, long range if it needs range, etc. But you know what? Even experienced players whiff moves all the time, and they *certainly* use attacks that do less damage than the combo they could have landed if they'd realized there was an opening.

I'm not a tournament-level player or anything, but I suspect even the best players in the world frequently use weaker attacks than they should have. And they probably still whiff or get canceled sometimes.

[MGuy]

Sorting your moves into "'I'm going to use an AoE attack, so I'll only check those" is no better than "I rolled a 3, so I'm going to only check the maneuvers on list 3". And on top of that, your own claim is that you are performing secondary sorting by just grabbing the first one that strikes your fancy. That's pathetic.

The great thing about this line is that it goes both ways. Eliminating options you don't want to use and having them forcefully taken away from you isn't really better coming or going.

The funniest thing is the complaints about people not always using the best choices because they cut them out is not fixed by WoF as complained about earlier. Cutting options off forcefully is NO BETTER than someone cutting them out themselves.

[Wrathzog]

Some of these values are negligible. I think 2-3 time units is rather high. Rolling a die and looking at a table takes as much time as evaluating three powers? I think not. These little constants are hidden everywhere, and while it's not really fair to ignore them in cases where we're talking about fixed quantities like 6 vs 12 (it actually turns out for small inputs, insertion sort, which is a very bad algorithm, is faster than quicksort, which is a very good algorithm), but we probably should ignore them anyway for simplicity unless you're convinced they add up, and I don't think they will.

I am. The Overhead from WoF is never going to be Zero, so it's always going to be an issue. Ignoring it is unfair, as you've said.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you want to know how to get the WoF Matrix down to a reasonable size, this thread is a good read: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52168

My personal favorite ways to make the WoF Matrix manageable:

• Start it off small, grow the pie higher as people gain levels. You start with a 3 x 4 Matrix, you end with a 5 x 6.
• Reduce the number of discrete 'power levels' in the game. 9--which is what D&D and a lot of hack derivative settings recommend--is way too damn many; it makes it too hard to ken differences in spell levels (6 is too similar to 7, 5 to 6, etc..). I recommend 6 power levels. A.K.A for an urban fantasy game in escalating kickassery you have Captain America, Wolverine, Johnny Storm, Iron Man, Magneto, and Dr. Strange.
• Like DSMatticus suggested, have some of the powers autoscale. This is so that you can have lower-level powers without feeling silly. These holdovers will be tend niche or generically useful maneuvers like command undead or fireball as opposed to multipurpose powers like polymorph other or levitate (Shadowrun version).
• Mandatory multiclassing and/or power incest (paladins AND druids have cure light wounds).

And if you want to see more suggestions, read the thread!

[Lago PARANOIA]

Eliminating options you don't want to use and having them forcefully taken away from you isn't really better coming or going.

Human beings often eliminate options based on inflexible, risk adverse, and overly convenient (aka least amount of thinking) criteria. This is key, because if it is inflexible and the person initially applied the wrong criteria it's really hard to put them back on the right track. What you're missing is that people often don't realize 'you know, I wonder if I might have a better move to use' and come up with a new heuristic.

Why? Who knows. Maybe the RNG is more important to success than decision-making, obfuscating outcomes. Maybe people are risk adverse and actions in TTRPGs are rarely 'pass/fail', but rather a engender degree of success and would rather have a wasteful or mediocre path to victory rather than a big success. Maybe people overestimate how good their result is and think that nothing needs to be changed. Maybe people are just stupid and lazy. Who knows. The point is, they stick to the same one, which will lead to a shallow decision-making process repeatedly rather than a trial-and-error process that leads to good results.

[talozin]

Are you really going there? Do you expect me to believe that Street Fighter players are notorious for making the right decision every time? No. There are two problems with having two many options. Sometimes you take too long to decide, and sometimes you make the wrong decision.

Completely independent of whether WoF is the greatest thing since sliced bread or the assiest thing since Adam's ass, I'm going to come right out and say it: sometimes making a wrong decision is not only not a problem, but it is a damned necessity. A system in which I cannot make a wrong decision is a system in which my decision-making input is unnecessary, and that's shit.

I'm good with providing a spectrum of decision-making models across a game to accommodate players ranging from whatever the fuck we call the kid who doesn't know how to play all the way to the Asperger's suffering super genius who spends at least four hours a day optimizing his immediate-action drills. But no matter how simple the decision making model is, sometimes your decision has to be wrong.

[fectin]

Don't all the studies mentioned here deal with novel pathing decisions, not familiar ones or recognition times?
Did I miss the part where someone showed that those are applicable?

[RobbyPants]

Human beings often eliminate options based on inflexible, risk adverse, and overly convenient (aka least amount of thinking) criteria. This is key, because if it is inflexible and the person initially applied the wrong criteria it's really hard to put them back on the right track. What you're missing is that people often don't realize 'you know, I wonder if I might have a better move to use' and come up with a new heuristic.

And they can't come up with a better heuristic after a bit of observation? How is making a bad decision or two and learning from it worse than getting a couple of bad WoF rolls?

And if the idea is that WoF never has a "bad" roll because each column has something for each situation, then why do we need to roll in the first place if those six moves (or whatever) are good enough for each situation?