The Granularity Condundrum: a possible solution?

[hogarth]

Well no, diplomacy just sucks ass as it's written. Mainly because the DCs are static and don't take into account the person you're diplomatizing at all.

True, but irrelevant for the purposes of the discussion. When Spartacus the charismatic human fighter has a +5 Diplomacy mod at level 1 and Napoleon the charismatic half-elf marshal has a +15 Diplomacy mod at level 1, something is screwed up (whether the target DC is static or not).

[K]

More subsystems do not indicate a finer granularity. Die size is an example of granularity. What K describes is something else entirely. I can't find a simple description for it, but in a computer game it would be a physics engine. And it is entirely true that 4E simply does not have it. 2E had a lot of special cases where you could use spell x to do y when special condition z was fulfilled. 3E unified those special rules into general rules, in essence giving us DnD physics for the first time.

I don't think anyone describes the die type as granularity.

Granularity for me has always meant how many subsystems you have for things and how complex those systems are. So 2e Shadowrun's unarmed combat has small amounts of granularity because it's a contested roll and someone wins. There are no maneuvers or combat abilities or weird things happening.

Step up the granularity and you get something like White Wolf where you get attack rolls and damage rolls and soaks and maneuvers and combat only abilities.

Then you get 3e DnD and you can literally spend an hour because all the little systems and possible choices. AoOs, unique subsystems for spell interactions like Antimagic, various action economies, etc mean a lot can be happening.

Now game balance is related to this granularity because every time people make abilities for these subsystems, there is a new opportunity to blow something important. Take AoOs, for example, where suddenly Combat Reflexes turns it into a real ability and crap like Robliar's Gambit and various other feats and class abilities and you are trying to balance the AoOs against regular iterative attacks.

Some subsystems add almost nothing to the granularity of the game. 3e DnD's initiative system is a good example because it has caps on it where you can add bonuses to it, but it's hardcoded to not allow for manipulation (like no changing initiative order).

3e's spell system is a huge amount of granularity because for every ten spells you have like five unique subsystems even with unifying mechanics like calling subschool for summoning.

Each subsystem is a chance to screw things up. 3e DnD has two systems for summoning monsters, three mind control systems for using monsters, one and half systems for temporarily becoming monsters, a system for being the leader of monsters, and an uncountable number of systems for creating monsters. That's a lot of systems for using monsters.

That's granularity to me. Unifying the mechanics makes the system more stable and balanced, but less interesting. By this criteria, 4e DnD is a less granular system, but a more boring system (and not just because they ratcheted the power way down).

[RandomCasualty2]

Granularity for me has always meant how many subsystems you have for things and how complex those systems are. So 2e Shadowrun's unarmed combat has small amounts of granularity because it's a contested roll and someone wins. There are no maneuvers or combat abilities or weird things happening.

It's not so much subsystems, as minigames. Adding a hacking minigame instead of a single Computer roll to hack something is adding granularity. Adding a series of climbing rolls where you make multiple rolls along the way and you know exactly where you fell is adding granularity. Adding a new feat or a new power point psionics system isn't adding granularity, it's just adding complexity.

Granularity is a concern with the breadth of results you can produce. The most basic and least granular way to handle anything is a single pass/fail.

Least granular: We won the fight. All the enemies are dead.

Adding some granularity: "we won the fight, but the fighter lost 6 hit points and the rogue died. Also one of the goblins managed to flee."

Really granular : "we won the fight, but the fighter's right arm got crippled and the rogue got beheaded. The fighter's arm is still bleeding and needs to be bandaged. The fighter's shield also got partially dented during the fight from one of the goblins blows. One of the goblins managed to flee down the east tunnel and has a 10 second headstart on the group. Another two goblins are on the ground bleeding from bleeding wounds to the torso and still alive, in 5 minutes if not bandaged they may completely die. A fourth goblin has a crushed windpipe and suffocating."

[Username17]

Controlling straight bonus accumulation is best done with aggressive bonus typing.

I don't think that is true. In fact, I'm fairly sure it is mathematically provably false. Let's say for the moment that a bonus (of whatever type) can go as far as pushing you from succeeding on the midpoint or better to you succeeding so long as your roll was within a standard deviation from the mean. On a curved or uncurved die roll, that pushes you from a success chance around 50% to a success chance around 84%. And that's totally reasonable. But if you have a second such bonus and an uncurved die roll to worry about, you are looking at a 114% chance of success - well off the RNG. And that's even before we consider that we were only concerned with the relative increase in the first bonus versus the opposition - it's entirely possible that such a bonus has the capability of giving a net benefit to your opponent with its absence (such as how To-Hit and Defense bonuses rarely start at zero). The first bonus by itself could very plausibly represent a bonus way more than 34% to get you to one standard deviation - and indeed almost certainly does.

So unless your bonus typing is so aggressive that there is in fact only one bonus type (type named "bonus" I guess), the bonus typing paradigm is not the best manner to reign in RNG shattering bonus accumulation. Hell, it's not even a method to reign that in, because bonus typing does not do that.

Bonus typing puts a hard cap on how many lines of addition you have to do by putting a hard cap on how many lines of addition you are allowed to do. But it does not inherently stop RNGs from breaking, because breaking RNGs is still incredibly easy to do.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

So unless your bonus typing is so aggressive that there is in fact only one bonus type (type named "bonus" I guess), the bonus typing paradigm is not the best manner to reign in RNG shattering bonus accumulation. Hell, it's not even a method to reign that in, because bonus typing does not do that.

Well yeah, bonus typing alone doesn't do that, you're right. I mean there's nothing stopping someone from creating a +100 bonus and totally creating a singular broken thing. But effectively in any extensible game, that's going to be a threat.

What bonus typing does is to prevent unknowing power creep among collaborative writers who may or may not know what other writers are doing. Assuming for instance that all feats grant the same bonus type, you don't have to worry about someone producing Skill Focus (Diplomacy) and Natural diplomat as feats that both add to diplomacy. At that point, you've managed to only have to deal with the bigger of the two and didn't stop any unintended stacking. Now that doesn't mean that the guy who wrote either feat can't break the game, but in a set up that allows new authors to add material, that's unavoidable. If some guy wants to go crazy go nuts and write up a power that's insanely broken standalone, then he very well can and there's very little your system can do to stop that.

At most you can just work such that you minimize two balanced powers being somehow combined to create something imbalanced.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Save divergence is itself an issue, but it is not an issue of power creep. It is an issue of even allowing for defenses and offenses to grow that far apart. Power creep makes it happen faster and in a given game may be what pushes people off the RNG, but the basic issue is the divergence itself.

It totally is an issue of vertical advancement. If you're going just by the classes and magical item gain, saves don't really diverge all that much between characters that fulfill a similar function until around level 12. Seriously, check out the DMG. Where things start to get wonky is when you throw in races, magical items, feats, multiclassing/PrCing, and spells into the mix.

Polymorph and Diplomancy on the other hand are designer mistakes. Polymorph especially is utterly insane, no matter what kind of game, group or campaign setting you can imagine, no matter what power level you are designing your abilities to.

That's not necessarily so. Polymorph is insane because it's either used for snagging overpowered abilities or because it's used to buff staffs. In Mutants and Masterminds, the various polymorph abilities allow you to completely recreate your character as the plot demands--but it's considered a waste of time among min-maxxers because your vertical advancement is capped. Polymorph/Transform/Boost is much more versatile in that game but far less broken than in 3E D&D.

If diplomacy worked in a sane way there would have been no need to put titanic bullshit bonuses into the game. If diplomacy had been written with combat application in mind it certainly would not have included an option to instantly win combat. But the main fuck-ups were pegging a skill check against a will save and writing abilities to allow you to use it in combat.

Oh... kay, but that still doesn't change the fact that just by going by the core rules and items diplomacy is still mostly a stupid pet trick. Diplomacy starts becoming a problem when you throw in +30 skill bonus items and magical spells and shit into the mix.

Again, big fucking deal. A lot of game effects end up like that when you start stacking bonuses onto them. If you could get a comparable bonus to your swording or defense or spellcasting skills, no one would care about diplomacy. Shit, if I could get a +30 bonus to my save DC, then fuck diplomacy. I'm casting phantasmal killer all of the time!

The only reason why the diplomancer build exists at all is because the game designers are much more stingy about combat bonuses than skill bonuses.

And even that pales in comparison to the dozens of abilities that manage to break the setting without ever bothering to check for numbers. Scry-and-die for example. Shadows. Vampires. Wishes.

And these things can all be fixed (or at least neutered) after a week's worth of writing, once you identify the problem. You can't do that for vertical advancement, which creates all of the same problems. Shit, man, don't you remember people complaining bitterly about the 3.0E Archmage or Multi-empowered Owl's Wisdoms?

[CCarter]

Bonus typing's main advantage is probably simplicity - depending on how many bonus types you have.
IMHO probably the most effective system of bonus control is to build a "diminishing returns" function into whatever gives the modifier - higher expenditures give less and less back. D&D of course does do this but indirectly e.g.
-Level increasing more slowly as XP total increases
-enhancement bonuses costing progressively more and more i.e. [bonus-squared] x 1000
-ability scores costing more as you approach 18.
There's no unified underlying costing in D&D, however, so maximizing a derived statistic efficiently costs a variable amount of resources depending on which resource pool you use (GP, feats, levels, stats), and you're generally best off dividing cost between as many categories as possible.

[Murtak]

Oh... kay, but that still doesn't change the fact that just by going by the core rules and items diplomacy is still mostly a stupid pet trick. Diplomacy starts becoming a problem when you throw in +30 skill bonus items and magical spells and shit into the mix.

Again, big fucking deal. A lot of game effects end up like that when you start stacking bonuses onto them. If you could get a comparable bonus to your swording or defense or spellcasting skills, no one would care about diplomacy. Shit, if I could get a +30 bonus to my save DC, then fuck diplomacy. I'm casting phantasmal killer all of the time!

The only reason why the diplomancer build exists at all is because the game designers are much more stingy about combat bonuses than skill bonuses.

But that's just it. Generally speaking skills in core 3E are stupid pet tricks. That is not necessarily a smart design decision, but it also means handing out +30 bonuses to a skill is ok. Retroactively turning pet tricks into powerful abilities breaks them. Of course skills should never have been silly gimmicks to start with. But retroactively turning them into combat abilities breaks the game, and that should have been obvious to whatever idiot designed those abilities. If they had been designed as powerful abilities to begin with and someone then added +30 bonuses, would you have called that power creep? Of course not. It would be another instance of a game designer on acid.

And these things can all be fixed (or at least neutered) after a week's worth of writing, once you identify the problem. You can't do that for vertical advancement, which creates all of the same problems. Shit, man, don't you remember people complaining bitterly about the 3.0E Archmage or Multi-empowered Owl's Wisdoms?

But you can fix those issues. You can even implement a dirty hack and just fix them for most games. But you can not have shades spawning more shades without your world drowning in shades. You can not have caravans in a world with permanent portals. You can not have a functioning market if every wizard can shatter the economy by accident. You can not even use polymorph without your game breaking because the second you depart from a premade example your game grinds to a stop while you try to figure out how the damn spell even works.



I guess we just have different notions of what broken means. To me broken means, that if you use the ability consistently either the world breaks down or your game stops. Merely being stupidly overpowered is not the same thing to me, especially not when it is fixable. So when you say "spell DCs are broken" I agree. But it is not getting to add +2 from feats and not even necessarily adding another +3 from archmage that makes them broken. Those bonuses are too big and should be looked at, but the only broken part is saving throw and spell DCs being innately divergent.

[Vnonymous]

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_comple ... and_skill/

This article pretty much answers the basic question.

[RobbyPants]

What bonus typing does is to prevent unknowing power creep among collaborative writers who may or may not know what other writers are doing.

So long as they don't do things like create new types, then types do help keep other writers from wrecking the game.

In order for this to work, you'd need to have some sort of cap per type and a set number of types, and you'd have to be comfortable with someone having the max bonus in all types (unless you have some other way of preventing that).

Of course, as Frank said, if you want your bonus to be noticeable, then you can only have so many types before you push yourself off the RNG. Even with just three bonuses (Magic, Luck, and Skill, or whatever), you'd still have to make sure you're not even getting a +15% bonus if your base success was at 50%. Either you need really small bonuses (10% or less), or your base success has to start quite low and you have to figure that anyone competent within a certain field would have a minimum level of bonuses.

[Username17]

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_comple ... and_skill/

This article pretty much answers the basic question.

The guy's thesis, while interesting and indeed tantalizing, is wrong. Complexity is required to add depth, but the amount of depth you get for any particular amount of complexity is wildly variable. Go is deeper than Chess, but the amount of rules is smaller. You simply get a lot more depth per complexity with the kind of complexity that Go employs than you do with any other kind of complexity I have ever seen.

You can therefore falsify his thesis fairly easily. Remove two units of complexity and add one unit of complexity that happens to come with a substantially better ratio of depth to complexity and you can indeed make your game simpler and deeper at the same time.

-Username17

[Vnonymous]

Making an individual rule add more or less complexity than another doesn't really change his thesis. Rules can of course add different amounts of complexity - he even mentions meaningless rules.

He even points out complexity being measurable as the distance between the best and worst possible players, as opposed to simply adding up the rules.

[Ice9]

That only applies if you use a meaning of "complexity" that only includes, and is directly proportional to, depth - ignoring things like number of steps, length of rules, number of different cases, and so forth. In which case you are simply saying that "adding more depth makes the game deeper".

Also, I would disagree about depth being the different between the best and worst possible players. Take a very simple event - the 100 meter dash. The hypothetical worst player could, in fact, take their entire lifetime to finish it. Even discarding that, the gap between an olympic sprinter and an out of shape 80 year old is massive. And yet, I'm not seeing a lot of complexity or depth there.

But wait, maybe you're "not counting" anything physical. Ok, purely mental - trivia. The game is to answer trivia questions about golf. The worst player has never watched, heard about, or even thought about golf. Again, massive gap. Where's the complexity and depth?


And incidentally, "retard-dominated modern age"? Really? Yeah, I can see how not spending one's time on mastering the most complex games possible is being a retard. I actually happen to like complex games, but I don't kid myself that I'm a genius flying above the slovenly masses by making a HERO character. It's a hobby - about as ultimately meaningful as building model ships.

[Murtak]

Also the "depth = best player - worst player" does not tell us anything about the learning curve of the game. Some games have exceedingly simple rules and players can be proficient quite fast but take a lifetime to master. Others may take a while to learn, but offer no depth beyond the initial learning phase. Both of these games may technically have the same depth. Practically though, that's bullshit. No one could seriously claim that Go and Descent have the same amount of gameplay depth, but I easily see the difference between good and bad players being similar in both games. You can't say the same for the difference between good and great players though.

[RandomCasualty2]

You can't say the same for the difference between good and great players though.

Yeah this is ultimately the real test of depth.

[Vnonymous]

Murtak, your point of "no depth beyond the initial learning phase" is covered by the "meaningless rules" part - something like Mortal Kombat will take a while to master simply due to the large number of "meaningless" rules.

As for the trivia example, that actually is an incredibly popular game played by large numbers of people already, called Trivial Pursuit. Large numbers of people find that entertaining and fun, and you can find it all over the place.

Secondly, the article was specifically talking about video games. Pen and paper games obviously have a few differences.

[Username17]

At the number of allowances you have made for that guy's essay, it is fair to say that the essay is not helpful or accurate as phrased.

It is indeed even possible to measure the absolute complexity of a game (and therefore its depth, and therefore the degree of skillful play that it allows) by simply measuring the maximum distance between the best and worst possible players.

This is wrong. There are many games that have been mentioned where the distance between the best and worst is infinity, where the complexity is nothing to write home about and the depth is quite shallow.

The guy's core thesis makes specific testable claims and those claims are bullshit!

-Username17

[Vnonymous]

Every single example pointed out so far has been pretty god-damn bullshit.

100 meter dash? If you think that its' so incredibly simple, why is there a gigantic industry devoted to improving the performance of the competitors? And remember, this is something that we have been doing for millenia. And we're still getting better at it. Human locomotion is actually pretty serious business - we are still unable to adequately recreate running with a robot. It is actually pretty damn complex. Now it does have some pretty high requirements which not everyone can make, which is why you have fewer people "playing" 100m dash as opposed to, say, Street Fighter.

As for the trivia problem - the difference between the best and worst player of that game is knowledge of golf. That's not much. You could come close to bridging the gap between the two in about a day with a golfing encyclopedia.

Measuring complexity under his rubric is measuring the difference between the best possible player and the worst possible player. The difference between a good player and the best player is explicitly a part of this.

[jadagul]

Vnonymous: your arguments work only because you're screwing with the definition of complexity in a really unnatural way. This is most obvious in the whole "meaningless rules" bit: Complexity determines the difference between the best and the worst player. Complexity is measured by the number of meaningful rules. How do we know if a rule is meaningful? If it affects the distance between the best and the worst player. Your conclusion is embedded in your definitions.

[Ice9]

Measuring complexity under his rubric is measuring the difference between the best possible player and the worst possible player. The difference between a good player and the best player is explicitly a part of this.

1) Measuring anything against the worst possible player is bullshit, because the worst possible player is someone who's physically unable to play the game, and/or has absolutely no knowledge of the rules, and/or is in a fucking coma. In which case, the gap is infinite, in every single damn game.

2) Not all skills are the same as depth! Reflexes is not depth. Physical endurance is not depth. Knowledge of trivia is not depth. I'm not saying those are useless skills, but they are not depth. Adopting a definite of "depth" that includes anything skill-based makes about as much sense as adopting a definition of "RPG" that includes anything with paper or pencils involved.

3) You keep claiming that "complexity = depth", and any form of complexity that does not generate depth is "fake". This is:
A) More pointless and obfuscating re-definition, again, like defining RPGs such that they include tennis.
B) A tautology, because then the central thesis becomes "more depth is more depth".

[Vnonymous]

1) We're talking about the worst possible player. Someone who can't play the game due to disability/being in a coma etc obviously isn't the worst possible player because they're not even a player at all. The worst player has to be able to play the game to even be considered as a player.

2. You seem to have no idea exactly what goes into "physical endurance". The actions you take and even the mentality you adopt can play a part in it - trying to run a marathon the same way as you'd run a sprint isn't going to get you anywhere. And while possessing reflexes isn't depth, being able to use them properly, and make snap judgements as to the best course of action sure as hell adds depth to a game. This usually isn't the case with roleplaying games (although immediate-action style interrupts would technically count here)

3. "Fake" complexity is doing things like adding three hundred race/class specific versions of Toughness. Options that you'll never take or that will never get used or have no effect on the game are meaningless and hence fake.

As for the tautology claim, all three concepts are inherently related. Complexity gives rise to depth, and depth gives rise to skill. Each new, meaningful rule(complexity) is something new to learn and exploit(depth), and that is skill.

[TheFlatline]

Okay, the worst possible player is someone to does not adhere to the rules but is playing, or perhaps is playing by the rules but doesn't understand the intent of the game. If I don't know that the goal of chess is to capture the king, then I'm probably going to be the worst chess player evar. Even then, I fit the definition, but my capabilities are trash & static noise. They tell you nothing other than the extreme end of the data set.

It would seem to me that a far more useful metric would be to take the mean average of the range of skill, say a chess player who averaged 50% win/loss over the course of thousands of games against thousands of players, and set that as a "competent player". They obviously have a firm grasp of the rules and at least the elementary understanding of how the rules can interact.

By starting with a competent player instead of the worst possible player, you see a far more relevant reflection of depth when compared to the best possible player.

If I'm a competent snakes & ladders player, because I know the rules and I have played it several times, there really isn't a difference between myself and the best possible player, since there is no real depth to the game.

However, if I'm a competent Go player, and I play against a world-class player, I'm going to have my ass handed to me so readily that it's going to make my head spin.

As Frank pointed out, complex rules do not create depth. Complex choices *can* create depth though, especially when you're dealing with complex, iterative choices. If each subsequent choice creates more choices, you quickly reach mind-bogglingly broad arrays of options, where a simple knowledge of the rules no longer directly benefits you. In other words, you can get better even after you have the rules memorized.

When you add a human into the mix, you're elevating the depth into something else entirely, and the game becomes a social exercise as well as an exercise in mechanical depth.

If you want a perfect example of how complex systems do not necessarily result in depth of gameplay, go look at B-17: Queen of the Skies. Published in the early 80's by Avalon Hill, it's *extremely* complicated for the amount of depth and choice you have. In fact, your only choice in the game is which guns are going to fire on which enemy fighters when there are multiple options. Otherwise you roll on something like 8 different double-sided pages of charts to see exactly what happens on your combat run, and it can get extremely complex.

[Murtak]

Murtak, your point of "no depth beyond the initial learning phase" is covered by the "meaningless rules" part - something like Mortal Kombat will take a while to master simply due to the large number of "meaningless" rules.

Fighting games are actually a nice example of depth in gameplay. After learning the controls and how to use specific moves you still have multiple levels of gameplay to learn. First you find out what moves do the most damage. Then you find out that a fast character can keep interrupting you and bee-sting you to death. So you find out what the fastest moves are. Then you get to reach. Movement speed. The mastery of these four elements just leads to to the next level of gameplay: positioning. After you mastered positioning you get find out what moves leave you exposed for how long, and which other characters can exploit that. You learn how your combos work, and when to only fake them. You learn which moves to block, to evade, to counter or to ignore.And after you are done learning all of that, for every possible combination of characters, you are still not done because after that it is all about mind games and throwing your opponent off balance.

Of course a different fighting game may be badly designed and then it is all about learning how to unleash your killer move and bam, you have mastered the game.

And in both of these games a skilled player will absolutely crush a newbie, 100 times out of 100. By your definition of the word, both games have the same depth. I posit that this is obviously bullshit.



P.S.: Note that in the first example all individual elements of gameplay are simple. Nothing need be complicated or even non-intuitive. Depth is created by the interaction of basic elements.

[Smeelbo]

In the mid- to late- 80's, there were some experiments done with Go to determine how rankings should really work, how much advantage does the first move yield, and how close to human capacity Go really is. Without going into too much detail, a Go board is 19 by 19 lines. While a few thousand years ago, Go boards were smaller (from 11 to 17 lines), players settled on 19 lines as the "proper" size for a Go board because, while stones placed on the third line of the board were fairly safe from stones played below them, stones played on the 4th line could be undermined by enemy stones placed below them (e.g., closer to the edge). With 19 lines, the amount of territory above the 4th line and below the 4th line are roughly equal, and so there is an implied balance between seeking secure territory below the 4th line and seeking "influence" in the large area above the 4th line. Smaller Go boards, and territory outweighs influence, while with larger Go boards, the value of outward influence outstrips the value of secure territory.

Experiments were done with larger Go boards. What was discovered was that as the size of the board increased from 21 to 23 lines, the correlation between Go rankings and game results weakened dramaticly, until by 23 lines, there was not much observational difference between the results for 5-dans and 9-dans (5th degree and 9th degree black belts). To explain: in regular Go, on a 19-line board, with two equally ranked professional players, the first player should beat the second player by about 8-9 points, and the higher the rank of the players, the lower the standard deviation of the difference. Further, for every difference in rank between two players, the expected difference in score should be about 7 points, and the stronger player should almost always beat the weaker player. Again, the stronger the players, the lower the standard deviation.

With 23 lines on the board, however, this no longer obtained. While stronger players tended to win more, it was much less often than expected. That is, the larger the board, the weaker the correlation between rank and winnings, and winning margin. The conclusion was that 23-line Go is too complex, and 19-line Go is "just right."

So it does not follow that the "deeper" a game is, the greater the observable difference between "good" players and "great" players. As games approach the human capacity to play well, such as large board Go, they become so complex that the difference between "good" players and "great" players is erased by the additional complexity.

To give an idea of the difference between a professional 5-dan and a 9-dan, Michael Redmond was the highest ranked professional American Go player, and he was a 5-dan. Title holding Asian professionals are almost always 9-dans, and Redmond would probably require a 2 or 3 stone handicap (equivalent to about 20 points) to have a 50/50 chance of winning against one.

Despite Go's ancient history and apparent simplicity of rules, there are still several unresolved issues regarding the game. There are at least three ways of counting score (Japanese, Chinese, and Ing), which yield the same results in almost all games. Likewise, there are three ways to resolve potential repetitions. The proper value of the komi (the point handicap given to the second player in a match between equally ranked players) varies from 5.5 to 8.5 stones, depending.

Indeed, after a few thousand years of play, there are still open questions about basic Go strategy. For example, while tradition holds that playing the first moves near the corners is best, it is still not clear whether an opening play in the center is a good move or a bad move. Professionals playing "The Great Wall" strategy, emphasizing the center over the corners, have done well in the last 20 years.

Smeelbo

[Crissa]

...Or the high level players all trained for 19, so upping it to 23 ruined their strategy. They have been playing that way from the day they were old enough to hold stones.

-Crissa