FrankTrollman wrote:I genuinely don't even know why you would think it was a problem that massive attacks against massive targets have double digit power and soak values. No one seems to give a shit that in D&D high level characters are subtracting double and triple digit damage numbers from double and triple digit hit point totals after modifying them by double digit DR or ER. Hell, no one gives a rat's ass about how high level characters are rolling a d20 + 34 in order to hit an AC or Save DC of 47.
I do have a problem with it. Not in terms of balance -- even though most games have fucked up the balance and implementation.
Rather, my problem with doing d20 + 34 to hit an AC or Save DC of 47 is that it makes the numbers gibberish from a narrative perspective. For example, in 3E D&D at low levels people can tell you that an AC of 21 is supposed to be hardcore. Like fullplate + heavy shield + some dex bonus. Or that a level 2 monster with a +8 attack bonus and a single 1d10+6 damage is fairly badass. Not a super-badass, but not someone you want to lightly mess with.
People just have a problem grokking the significance of large numbers. I maintain that in a 10-level system with the power scaling of D&D telling your group that the level 6 royal retainer taking on 40 level 4 guards without breaking a sweater forms a clearer mental image than describing the system as 40 levels, 24th-level retainer, 16th-level guards.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sun Jan 20, 2013 7:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
This doesn't even begin to make sense. Numbers that have been passed through a log engine are smaller than ones that have not. You are literally arguing that people have a hard time with two digit numbers, so we should give them three, four, or even five digit numbers instead.
You're not just wrong: this is the opposite of true.
In the original Paper Mario, you deal 1 or 2 damage per attack at the start of the game and are doing 9 or 10 with your special attacks at the end, where you are probably around level 22. The final boss has 99 hit points.
How much difference in toughness should there be between a goblin and a giant dragon?
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:This doesn't even begin to make sense. Numbers that have been passed through a log engine are smaller than ones that have not. You are literally arguing that people have a hard time with two digit numbers, so we should give them three, four, or even five digit numbers instead.
You're not just wrong: this is the opposite of true.
-Username17
I titled the thread stupidly. I do that. I was trying to come up with a monotonic scale that's between quadratic and linear and said the wrong friggin' thing. I misused the terminology. So my bad.
REGARDLESS, though, what is your opinion on high numbers on linear-to-sub-quadratic RNGs?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Using numbers with more digits makes the necessary additions / subtractions needed at the game table harder to perform. This is a big limit and why few games use triple digit numbers for anything but the high end of there overall scale
Using numbers with fewer digits gives you less room for granularity in your system scale. This is the big limit on the low end and why almost all TTRPGs use more than single-digit numbers fairly frequently.
From Lago's initial post, it looks like he's arguing that less granularity is good in that it also represents a smaller memory commitment from players to be able to accurately evaluate the threat of any given enemy within the scale of any given level??
He did make me wonder if there's a term for the greater-than-linear, but less than quadratic n * log (n) scaling though?
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Josh Kablack wrote:From Lago's initial post, it looks like he's arguing that less granularity is good in that it also represents a smaller memory commitment from players to be able to accurately evaluate the threat of any given enemy within the scale of any given level??
It's not just the memory commitment, but yes. Saying that someone has a climb skill of 6 when the scale maxes out at 9 just, in my highly subjective opinion, feels different than saying someone has a climb skill of 24 when the scale maxes out at 36. Having people mentally discard or overlook unused bits of granularity IMHO causes an at-a-glance number to lose some of its impact. Even if the game designers and players are able to handle the math.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
"We are the chorus, and we agree.
We agree, we agree, we agree."
I'm kind of surprised that a 6th level dude is a match for 40 4th level ones, but I agree that granularity can obfuscate. "Can", being the operative word.
As one theoretical counter-example, consider a high-granularity system with a series of well-defined benchmarks at universal breakpoints: "everyone knows that a 15 is equivalent to the upper range of base human capability". Absent those benchmarks, or in a case where the breakpoints are all over the place, I can certainly see the granularity being WSoD-breaking simply by virtue of requiring a look-up chart that breaks the flow of play.
That's because absent a skill system and my own motivation I don't want to list out what each benchmark means relative to each skill/task/what-have-you. Presumably a designer working on their own game would have both.
EDIT: Consider this --
"Everyone knows that a 15 is equivalent to the upper range of base human capability, which, relative to the use of acrobatics in conditions such as these under consideration, is XXX." Within the rules would be descriptions of other multiple "upper range" undertakings relative to various conditions. And then similarly-expansive descriptions at other universal breakpoints. And then everything repeated for other tasks/skills.
The point would be that you'd have a series of descriptive benchmarks which point towards some within-the-game universal understanding of what those various benchmarks generally represent, such that when someone tells you that you have a +37 but your opponent is resisting at +43, you have some measure by which to judge those numbers.
Last edited by mean_liar on Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:
It's not just the memory commitment, but yes. Saying that someone has a climb skill of 6 when the scale maxes out at 9 just, in my highly subjective opinion, feels different than saying someone has a climb skill of 24 when the scale maxes out at 36. Having people mentally discard or overlook unused bits of granularity IMHO causes an at-a-glance number to lose some of its impact. Even if the game designers and players are able to handle the math.
This seems to have some truth as far as how people use numbers. I've read a book or two recently that talk about how people start off having a much better grasp of "relative" numbers, where the difference from 1->2 feels bigger than from 9->10 and so on. Many native people and others who haven't learned formalized math (kids,etc) seem to use this logarithmic math intuitively. So a system that plays to our "natural" inclinations could help in simplifying things.
I don't think that attack and defense numbers really need to be grokked in any real sense, since they can't be used to knot-cut and necessarily don't have correlates to what can be done in the real world independent of stabbing fools; attack and defense numbers are abstractions of capabilities, the only purpose of which is to stab and not get stabbed, so we don't have to have equivalents for them outside of stabbing.
The Epic Level Handbook is a perfect example of showing that when the numbers get big enough, nobody has a clue what the hell they're supposed to mean. For instance, I don't think there's any creature in the ELH that can bash through a 3 foot thick stone wall in one blow, not even the creatures that are supposed to be ginormous or the epitome of strength. Why? Because one writer decided that 540 hit points was good for a section of castle wall, and another writer decided that 200 hit points (or whatever) in a single attack is more than any creature would ever need to do, and because anything over 100 hit points tends to blur into one big hazy lump.
The other example comes to mind is DC Heroes, where Wonder Woman can throw Mount Everest 100 feet and Superman can throw Mount Everest 800 feet (or whatever). Is that supposed to be meaningful in any way?
Last edited by hogarth on Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
ELH has a CR 57 that can deal 3240 damage a round to anyone with an AC below 77, but DR 10/- will negate nearly half of it. And a bug that has 3000 HP. The numbers are totally made up.
There's something to be said for chunking the conceptual space if you have >~7 levels, so you can be a normal human, or an heroic meta-human, or a legendary super-human, or an epic demi-god, and within each you can be level 1-4 or maybe 1-6.
You can totally do that with bonus inflation, reset it occasionally. So instead of attacking at +34 you're +4 epic. Not any real problem if the monster numbers are lined up the same, you're just +10 vs lower tier monsters and -10 vs higher tier. Same for like damage and DR, or even number of attacks or tiered effects for spells.
The game designers might be a bit less stupid with their bonus inflation, or, you know, not.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
tussock wrote:You can totally do that with bonus inflation, reset it occasionally. So instead of attacking at +34 you're +4 epic.
The other day I had the idea for "EPIC Red Box D&D". It's like regular level 1-3 D&D, except you replace "1 hit point" with "1,000 mortal wounds" (like Palladium's SDC/MDC). So instead of saying "you're fighting an orc with 6 hp", you say "you're fighting an army of 6,000 orcs" or "you're fighting the god of orcs". Voila -- epic rules!
