Help me actually understand Winds of Fate.

[Koumei]

I have to say, I'm not sure I like the idea of drawing cards for it. We'll get the irrational reason out of the way first: humans base decisions off experience - it's how we learn not to touch fire and that all people named Ben are cockgoblins. My experience with dice has been "they're random, try to use numbers to shunt the randomness off the table but they'll roll about and come up with any number more or less evenly."

My experience with cards is that I always get the shit cards if I don't rig the deck beforehand. Hence, I hate cards and always will.

Now onto more legitimate reasons:

1. Players forget their sheets half the time. Sure, the cards will look pretty (yeah I had fun making those power/status cards I never used for 3E), but the fact is they'll lose half and forget to bring the other half.

2. You can say "roll 1d6, compare it to every list on the chart" (which also allows for the 1 or more general-use lists, one special rare list and so on) and that's less of a mess than telling the player to keep their cards arranged into five decks, and they have to shuffle each deck and draw one card from each. Each session will START with the decks being mixed up (except for those who didn't bring their cards).

3. If you care about players cheating (I don't, but some do, whatever), you can say "Roll it where I can see it" and keep a copy of their charts or whatever, but cheating with cards is easy. Not "so easy that you can happily cheat against a mobster and get rich that way", but the MC isn't a mobster who runs an illegal poker den. Unless you're in NSW, in which case he probably is.

[PhoneLobster]

It's frustrating, but perhaps an essential part of human nature. If you give someone a package with a lovely cake, they'll be thrilled. If you give them a lovely cake that happens to be visibly next to two different equally lovely cakes that they aren't getting, they'll be angry.

So in other words WoF made players angry, as I expected, until you sufficiently obscured what it was actually doing to their decision making using cards.

Yeah, really successful testing there Frank.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Isn't it interesting that every single suggestion about implementing WoF seems to revolve around "but I want a god damn select my next move ability of some form".

Which you know. Is utterly counter to the point of WoF.

Yes, but there are several reasons why people make this suggestion.

1) People want a way of using Move #14 when they're not on a time crunch without having to repeatedly roll a dice.

2) People want to make the game more like the (amazingly broken) system of Yu-Gi-Oh, which has a huge amount of determinism and search in it.

3) People don't actually want to obviate the roll all of the time, they just want a proviso for when it's dramatically or tactically appropriate.

4) People would be willing to go with WoF if they had an explanation for their WSoD. As long as they're not just using it as a stalling tactic I'm willing to provide an explanation.

5) People actually do want to ignore the mechanic altogether. These suggestions can be discarded.

And largely proves that hey, people don't actually fucking want their tactical decisions made by a 1d6 each turn.

Oh, people say that about every innovation that comes to D&D. Then people have an internal Orwellian retcon.

This isn't even like 'things would be better if we got rid of random hit points or cursed items', this is totally a situation of 'we tried all of the other alternatives and they sucked, unless you have a better suggestion this is what we go with'.

I mean, seriously PL, what's your alternative to WoF?

[Lago PARANOIA]

So in other words WoF made players angry, as I expected, until you sufficiently obscured what it was actually doing to their decision making using cards.

What?! What possibly compelled you to type this sentence? Where did you get that kind of conclusion?

[Orion]

Lago,

Your point 3 is bullshit. Wanting to ignore WoF when "tactically appropriate" is wanting not to play under WoF. The system is doomed unless people are as willing to accept death due to a bad roll in the same way they would accept death due to a miss, or running out of spells.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Your point 3 is bullshit. Wanting to ignore WoF when "tactically appropriate" is wanting not to play under WoF.

Why does someone have to play WoF 100% of the time? Why can't it be 95% or 90%?

I agree that WoF breaks very easily if you don't use it enough of the time to resolve powers--I'd say that the bottom limit is about 80%--but I'm not totally against the idea of people now and then getting to go 'fuck it' and use The Best Power In This Situation Ever. I just think that people vastly overestimate the amount of times that kind of situation ever comes up, which is why people usually complain about it harshing their buzz.

[Username17]

Also, since the WoF generation is made before action declaration, you won't normally have the WoF generation be the thing that makes you lose. Sure you may end up with a less optimal attack to use, but the less optimal attack is still the last random generation you make - not the WoF generation. So the thing that dramatically leaves you open to get killed by the ogre is that your long-shot attack didn't drop the ogre before his deadly reprisal came.

-Username17

[Orion]

But people always round "likely to work" up to "would have worked" in counterfactuals. If your character has a move A with chance of success > 50% and > the moves they did have access to the turn before they died, then they will be convinced that "If I could have used A it would have worked' even if B is ALSO >50 % (80% vs. 60%, say).

EDIT: I'm not a detractor, I would happily play under WoF. That doesn't mean Lago gets to understate the severity of the objections

[Username17]

But people always round "likely to work" up to "would have worked" in counterfactuals. If your character has a move A with chance of success > 50% and > the moves they did have access to the turn before they died, then they will be convinced that "If I could have used A it would have worked' even if B is ALSO >50 % (80% vs. 60%, say).

Possibly. But I think you're way overestimating the number of actions a player looks into the past when bemoaning the fact that an ogre smashed their face in.

The actual cause of them getting their face pounded in is that the ogre took the face pound action and rolled well enough to pound their face and then the damage and/or soak result was disastrous enough that their face got pounded all the way in. They may look back into the past far enough to see that their own attack didn't drop the ogre before that happened. They may look even farther into the past to their own choice to attack the ogre rather than dodge or cut-and-run. But looking even farther back into the past to check the resource management allocations from the previous turn to see that they hadn't gotten the chance to ready an even better anti-ogre technique to maybe drop the ogre before the face pounding started is kind of thin.

People just don't do much of the chess-match analysis on ogre face poundings in RPGs. Even playtesters whose actual job it is to figure out interactions rarely put that much thought into things.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Well the basic check of the "Don't worry no one will blame the 'resource management' even when it IS at fault!" line is pretty easy.

Do people blame traditional resource management when it prevents them from using an action that "would have succeeded"?

Yes. People DO bemoan the fact that they only died "because they were out of mana" or "ran out of arrows" or what have you.

And thats in a resource system they have control over.

And frankly Lago. My alternative is ANYTHING. Vancian is better than this shit. And a lot of players are going to say the same thing to you when you start telling them they rolled a move type action this turn and pretending you are playing something called an "RPG".

[Lago PARANOIA]

But people always round "likely to work" up to "would have worked" in counterfactuals. If your character has a move A with chance of success > 50% and > the moves they did have access to the turn before they died, then they will be convinced that "If I could have used A it would have worked' even if B is ALSO >50 % (80% vs. 60%, say).

A) Believe it or not, people get a lot more upset about outcomes they (theoretically) had complete control over than ones with randomness in it. People get a lot more upset about blowing Poker or Scrabble than Monopoly or Battleship. And it's not like other systems are immune to disappointment. Surely you've had an occasion where you've or other people have gone 'oh man, if only I didn't didn't blow my Daily on the previous encounter I didn't even really need I could've used it for THIS one!'? It's just part of the game.

B) This kind of outcome can actually be somewhat desired as punishment for people not building their decks properly. If you as the pre-4E Wizard prepare a spell list that has some logically sound but situationally turkey options in it and you lose for want of a nail, expecting more sympathy from game designers than 'better luck next time' makes you a pill.

C) WoF gives you the luxury of having to face that 'problem' at all. The 'oh man this power would've been perfect against an ogre in a way that the other points won't' problem doesn't happen in other systems without being unbalanced or creating option paralysis. While it's true that a lot people get more whiny about about a bad situation happening out of chance or choice than it getting forced on them, it's important to impress on the players that the reason why they're able to have this retrospective at all is that they had a system flexible enough to accommodate it. Or in more snarky terms, if the players were happy about not getting an allowance at all but are unhappy now because they have a sense of how poor they are since they can only afford one out of three times, just call them stupid douchebags.

D) Here's a dark secret about gaming. It's actually desirable for some of the agents to make suboptimal decisions. Easy example, Tic-Tac-Toe/Naughts and Crosses. People play that shit all of the time when they're younger but stop after a certain point, because it's pretty deterministic once you know what's going on. The same thing happens with Checkers. It stops being fun after the players gain enough skill with the games to be making optimal moves all of the time.

Now don't misunderstand me. A game that relies on the players constantly making suboptimal choices in order to function is not a good game. But a game in which all of the players are always making superoptimal choices isn't much better either, no matter how well it's designed. And no game of sufficient complexity has even come close to being optimally designed either. And no, this calculus doesn't change if one person is always allowed to make superoptimal choices, same reason why Checkers doesn't suddenly become fun if you're playing against an amateur.

Now traditionally games have introduced a suboptimal factor into the games by use of the RNG and while that's vital (along with being quick, theoretically balanced, easy to understand, and thematic) I sometimes wonder if it actually goes far enough. What happens is that at the expert level of D&D people still calculate DPR and average round time, lean conservative, and then construct a generic optimal strategy with room for some minor tweaks in it. The generic proposed solution to that is to specifically construct challenges for players that break them out of the Five Moves of Doom mindset, which falls into the same category of non-solutions as 'throw Golems at the overpowered wizard!' or 'have the players fight in anti-psionic fields more often!' or 'sent out more monsters that have radiant resistance!' etc..

So yes, answering your question in a very roundabout way, you actually don't want players to be able to always pick out the best move, because it leads to people (figuratively) submitting a combat flow chart while they go play Super Smash Bros. The 'oh man, if only I rolled that move against the ogre' lament is actually something you want, because if they were able to consistently identify that attack then you have a boring game.

[MGuy]

I wouldn't mind playing WoF however I don't consider it, the things that have been laid out for it, or even the problem it is supposed to solve "better" than other resource systems. Honestly I think it'd probably end up equal to the other systems. I think Josh made a post asking about which kind of WoF we were talking about and I had already assumed it was the third he mentioned. Until I see the full system on paper and it works out in play "better" than the other resource systems then I can't make the leap of faith to believe that this particular system will revolutionize or even improve the game in any particular fashion.

[Lago PARANOIA]

And frankly Lago. My alternative is ANYTHING. Vancian is better than this shit.

Uh, in what way? And Vancian magic? Seriously? Is that what you're going with? I wonder how much you've been paying attention to 3E D&D. Here are the myriad ways in which Vancian magic fails:

If you do 3E's system where people get a whole mess of power charges and are supposed to ration them for the day, the system becomes wildly unbalanced once people figure out how to game the workday. A CR 8 encounter simply doesn't mean the same thing to two groups with the exact same character sheets depending on how successful they are at manipulating the encounter spread. This is a huge problem.

If you give people a replenishing amount of charges, it leads to Five Moves of Doom where people figure out two or three best opening combos with little deviation from it and combat becomes boring deterministic graphing calculator fests. People use their best moves in order and stick to them because it's the best way to conduct combat. This has happened repeatedly in 3E and 4E and I'm sure in other games, too.

If you give people a replenishing amount of charges and make the effects relatively equal in power level and situational usefulness, it leads to 4E D&D where all of the powers and characters feel the same and there's little point in power or class selection at all. People use 'whatever' power because there's seriously no difference between Fireball and Lightning Bolt worth caring about.

If you avoid that and make the powers feel different from each other, this leads to people taking too damn long to make decisions. Either newbies unsure of what power to use for this tactical situation or wannabe masterminds taking 5 minutes for their turn like they're playing chess. And since this isn't chess people are going to yell at their party members to get on with it and this leads to people going 'fuck it, Cloudkill'. Which either leads to move spam or people feeling that their choices don't matter or resentment over not getting to pick the 'right' option.

What could possibly make you say that Vancian is a better system than WoF? For really simply combat engines like DragonStrike Vancian is an acceptable alternative, but for one as complex as D&D it's failed us for decades.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I wouldn't mind playing WoF however I don't consider it, the things that have been laid out for it, or even the problem it is supposed to solve "better" than other resource systems.

What problems do you think that WoF are supposed to solve and why do you not think that it does not solve the problems the best?

[PhoneLobster]

Uh, in what way? And Vancian magic? Seriously?

Seriously. X uses per arbitrary recharge. It's crappy, it's cheap, it's been "done to death". But it actually works and it's really simple. But most importantly it leaves the actual resource management decisions however minimal or poor to the player.

The WoF system solves the "problem" of people picking optimal powers the only real way you can 100% guarantee to solve it. By outright just not letting them make optimal choices (in either tactical or role playing senses). The removal of choice is a shockingly dumb idea.

Is that what you're going with?

Yes and no. When I run 3.x house ruled to hell and back the main resources used by the players are Vancian magic charges and to some degree with various builds classes and items, AoOs and other action limits per round. This arguable works poorly. But there is some pretty hefty legacy there, and at least the players get to CHOOSE, even if it's a choice often made at character building or otherwise in between combat.

When I run my own straight up house rules, well, I've explained on various occasions the directions I have gone with on resource management and so forth, and actually that has been really successful. Players do NOT use the same ultimate combo's over and over again, and it (primarily) isn't so much the resourcing system that causes that behavior, it's the nature of things like the rather variable attack vs specific defense bonuses, and the fact that abilities are interesting and situationally diverse.

If the ONLY thing stopping people from using the "killer combo" over and over again in your system is WoF. Then your system is pretty sucky even before we get to the bit where you don't make decisions in combat. Really. You should be using interesting and diverse abilities that actually DO make a player sit down and say "which one should I use this time?". And WoF is NOT part of that. WoF definitionally CANNOT be part of that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The removal of choice is a shockingly dumb idea.

WTF are you talking about? THIS IS THE ENTIRE POINT BEHIND A RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

The Vancian system as done by D&D removes choice, too. The fireball you used at the beginning of the day will limit the amount of choices you can make later on. It's not as obvious because people are shockingly cavalier about borrowing from the future to benefit themselves now, but don't kid yourself; it's a removal of choice as grievous as WoF.

Why is being punished or rewarded for decisions you made. probably in a vacuum, two or three encounters ago so desirable? It's a pretty dumb system which leads to counter-intuitive and anticlimatic behavior like people not using their sole level 4 spell against the BBEG because he expects ninjas to attack them later in the night. Or people bailing out of a workday early in order to make themselves more powerful in aggregate.

You should be using interesting and diverse abilities that actually DO make a player sit down and say "which one should I use this time?".

... which Winds of Fate can do, only it neems it down from 15-40 to 3-8 if you use the Green Arrow variant.

Why do you want to have MORE abilities than that? That shit slows the game down too much. And no, don't tell me that it just worked fine in 3E D&D because it didn't.

3E D&D has a built-in mechanic that sorted powers by power level. You may have heard of it, it's called a spell level. They're not equal and diverse choices by definition unless the game designer fucked up. The typical decision tree for a player went:
[*] What's the highest-level spell I have rationed for this fight?
[*] Do I have a spell of the highest-level prepared that will have a good effect?
[*] If I don't, then I go down to the next level.
[*] Repeat until Baby Jesus cries.

If 3E D&D did something like the Frank/Suleiman Sorcerer where you could pick from 30 different spells to use in one slot, the option paralysis would be fucking out of control, even for expert players.

Really. You should be using interesting and diverse abilities that actually DO make a player sit down and say "which one should I use this time?". And WoF is NOT part of that. WoF definitionally CANNOT be part of that.

A) This is a retarded thing for a defender of the Vancian decision to say, because the Vancian method does the exact same thing. Sure, it's more diverse at the beginning of the day, but at the end of the day it's even more restrictive than WoF if you've been playing it like you're supposed to. The only reason why you'd think Vancian is an advantage in this area is because you're cheating the system or you're one of those people who buys houses with credit cards.

B) Depending on the WoF system you're proposing, you can still have access to a lot of choices. Having 4-6 distinct options to choose from is plenty. The only reason you'd need more powers than that is if one of the powers available isn't 'Win the Encounter Immediately'; excuse me for not shedding a tear for these wannabe chessmasters.

[MGuy]

Well I believe WoF is supposed to solve decision paralysis and this 5 moves of Doom thing that's been mentioned. Now I don't know if it will actually accomplish this task, as I for one believe that in order to keep the game mechanics at least as interesting as regular DnD then the system as a whole will have to be more complicated in other areas to shore up for the simplicity the WoF makes which could then in turn defeat whatever time saving benefits it may have.

If the system is not made more complicated I think it may indeed solve these issues fairly well but I do not think that even then it will actually beat out just plain using Mana or Charges. Using Charges, if I'm thinking right, keeps decision making fast because you generally know what you're going to do but has the cost of people basically knowing what they are going to do in combat already (which isn't so big of a problem IMHO). Mana Does pretty much the same but has the added accounting of Mana points but I don't see that as being any more of a hassle than referring to your matrix.

However, again, my primary concern for what otherwise sounds like a fine system (tangent- I like playing MAGIC and YuGiOh when I'm playing more casually and against decks that don't win the game in 2-3 turns /tangent-) is that it won't be very robust. Because of the way WoF ~sounds~ I fear too many of the moves will end up samey.

[Lago PARANOIA]

as I for one believe that in order to keep the game mechanics at least as interesting as regular DnD then the system as a whole will have to be more complicated in other areas to shore up for the simplicity the WoF makes which could then in turn defeat whatever time saving benefits it may have.

What makes you think that? I have a pretty low opinion of D&D game designers, but not that low. Except for Bruce Cordell, I don't think that any game designer would go wow, we have a simple and elegant system that provides a lot of choice. This scares me. Let's intentionally fuck it up in some way!

Using Charges, if I'm thinking right, keeps decision making fast because you generally know what you're going to do

What's the maximum number of distinct charge options do you think that a player can handle before it gets to be overwhelming? What's the minimum before things become boring? If you have a system which has a scaling number of charge options, about what point in the game does it break down or starts to work?

However, again, my primary concern for what otherwise sounds like a fine system (tangent- I like playing MAGIC and YuGiOh when I'm playing more casually and against decks that don't win the game in 2-3 turns /tangent-) is that it won't be very robust. Because of the way WoF ~sounds~ I fear too many of the moves will end up samey.

This is a very valid concern. WoF is essentially pointless if the choices are 'should I use this ranged 10 4d4+4 attack' or 'should I use this ranged 5 5d6 slide enemy one square' attack. I mean, all systems have this problem, but because the Green Arrow variant of WoF demands a lot more potential powers the game designers will really have to wrack their brains in order to think of distinct powers. Not to mention that they also have to master conserving space and words in order not to make the word count get out of hand.

Are game designers up to the challenge? I'd hate to say so, but probably not. The current 4E designers couldn't handle a much more permissive system.

[MGuy]

1) "provides a lot of choice" is what concerns me. If the system is too simple there won't be a lot of choices, as PL has been ranting about and I repeat in my primary concern. I do not see how you can retain a good amount of depth if the system is "too" simple. MAGIC in order to maintain depth (as it has a simple WoF mechanic by virtue of being a card game) is complicated in other ways to make up for the simplicity of the Draw a card, play a card, mechanic.

2) the number of options given on a charge counter is a separate issue from the charge mechanic itself. You can fill an individual WoF row with whatever number of abilities you want and just the same you can give very few abilities on a charge mechanic based game.

3) I don't think that today's game designers are incapable of doing it. I'm sure there are things tyhat can make it happen but I'd assume the system outside of the core WoF system would need to be deep enough to allow for flexible abilities.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If the system is too simple there won't be a lot of choices, as PL has been ranting about and I repeat in my primary concern.

The system isn't the end-all and be-all of choice. Just as important are the powers you get to select. No system in the world will make up for the fact that 4E Warlord's 12 or so powers are all boring to choose.

But even so, choice isn't always a good thing. The problem is that when you have too many choices. If you have too many choices then it becomes hard to decide what to do--and as we've seen from other game systems, people have seriously maladaptive behaviors when choice becomes too complex. Net-decking, Ability Spam, taking 5 minutes during your turn to make a decision, letting other people control your character, etc.

This is why I repeatedly ask you guys: how much choice is too much? If you can't answer that then no resource management system is ever going to work for you on more than a vague 'this is what I'm used to' level.

2) the number of options given on a charge counter is a separate issue from the charge mechanic itself.

It's very multifaceted and you can't just separate them and analyze the systems differently, otherwise you'll get misleading results.

Some things to consider:

If you have too many options on a charge counter then it doesn't really function much differently from just having an unlimited power use. You can see that effect with a high-level 3E wizard on a short workday. They don't really play too dissimilar from the MC declaring 'you can use whatever power you want'.

Too few options and you'll have to have some repeats or force a player to bail out once the charges run out. This is what 4E does.

Also of concern is how many charges you expect people to use in an encounter. Even if you give people 10 charges to use in an encounter, a 3-round combat will play differently from a 7-round combat. You can see 4E for an example of this. Even if the average combat length was kept to the standard 5 rounds, paragon tier characters (who have a lot of charges) would interact with the resource management system differently than heroic tier characters (who don't).

Etc,,

[MGuy]

Well I actually don't know the answer to that question you've repeatedly asked. I'm not a good person to ask because I enjoy complex systems as long as they aren't uselessly complex. I think that 20 choices, in my book is fine. 30+ (which is generally more unique cards than you'd have in a given gaming deck) may be a bit much.

But then I believe that it is each player's responsibility to intricately know their characters. I mean its practically the only responsibility they have. However I've seen people trip up over who to auto attack. However I cannot speak for everyone so I do not have a solid answer for you. 4-6 (number of moves a pokemon has to the number of cards you'll probably have in your hand in MAGIC) seems like a valid number.

As for the second part I don't believe charges should be as damning as per day. I believe they should exist specifically on a per encounter or X turns basis if I were to use them (which I do but not at the core of my Mana based system) at all. But implementation is why we SHOULD separate things like Charges, Mana, and WoF from the rest of the system and analyze them individually. Bad implementation can make a general idea ~seem~ worse than it actually is.

[tussock]

And Vancian magic? Seriously? Is that what you're going with? I wonder how much you've been paying attention to 3E D&D. Here are the myriad ways in which Vancian magic fails:

I'll just plug in here, as I'm a recent convert to the benefits to be had from the better Vancian systems. 3e isn't really one of them, as we'll see.

If you do 3E's system where people get a whole mess of power charges and are supposed to ration them for the day, the system becomes wildly unbalanced once people figure out how to game the workday. A CR 8 encounter simply doesn't mean the same thing to two groups with the exact same character sheets depending on how successful they are at manipulating the encounter spread. This is a huge problem.

OK, there's a lot going on in that statement, you'll excuse my taking it apart.

1: you can have weeks, or even lifetimes with delayed recovery and sapping effects on Vancian. Your Fighters can be all go all the time, as can a portion of the Wizard's lesser magics, while Wish can be five or ten per lifetime, and higher level spells effectively once per adventure with long recovery times. Spells that are a problem for the game can be make a problem for the character that casts them too.

1a: only one copy of each spell prepared at a time, carefully designed durations, a character cost to activate wands, tightly limited stacking, easy dispels, potion joke tables, ... there's lots of ways to ensure a character can only bring so much mojo to each battle, even with a Vancian system, if that's your desire.

2: encounter management is a fun game for some players. Rather than the 4e (and later 3e) idea of every encounter being just exactly tough enough to not quite kill you all, one can throw out a great many potential encounters and let the players work on beating them in an order that makes it easiest, avoiding the gang ups, targeting the weak spots, sewing confusion in the ranks, ....

2a: Encounters should really be able to gang up and still not be too much of a TPK threat, otherwise you can't ever do that even when it makes sense to.

If you give people a replenishing amount of charges, it leads to Five Moves of Doom where people figure out two or three best opening combos with little deviation from it and combat becomes boring deterministic graphing calculator fests. People use their best moves in order and stick to them because it's the best way to conduct combat. This has happened repeatedly in 3E and 4E and I'm sure in other games, too.

5MoD is in the nature of your challenges. It's based around the idea that the best solution on average to a set of problems is the best solution to every problem in that set. To make that untrue, you have to put a wider variety of problems in the set.

OK, you can also ban players from being optimal, as WoF would. But seriously? That's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Optimisation is /fun/ for many D&D players.

...

Sure, option paralysis is a problem with vancian, but not for everyone. Remember the Fighter? If you suffer such issues badly, that's /your choice/. If you /like/ the press of high pressure decision making in a short time, you can play the Wizard.

We can even make the decisions easier, with decision trees. Clearly define your spells by the normal use (we even have eight traditional schools that could be put to work there, if the designers didn't keep trying to let everyone have cake all the time) and players can break their decisions into reasonable chunks. That shit works, 5-9 nodes per step is very functional.

It even helps with prep, as you fill in the tails you want to have available.

What could possibly make you say that Vancian is a better system than WoF? For really simply combat engines like DragonStrike Vancian is an acceptable alternative, but for one as complex as D&D it's failed us for decades.

Vancian magic as written is about empowering the player to change the game. Spells find the clue, solve the puzzle, pick the fights, win the fights, and return the prize (but only the parts of that you choose for each particular character, and not all day anyway). All the Fighter does is give you the space you need to cast the damn things (until 3e, where you take a 5' step away to cast and the monster takes an AoO to walk past him, so the Fighter just doesn't matter any more, he's just a damage machine).

I happen to like the old idea, where the Wizard is chock full of win (one or more times per adventure), but you need a team of other guys to let the poor bastard survive long enough to use it. I'm usually the guy up front keeping him alive, and it's been fun for a lot of years now.

[Swordslinger]

The removal of choice is a shockingly dumb idea.

WTF are you talking about? THIS IS THE ENTIRE POINT BEHIND A RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

Not quite. In many cases resource management can create interesting choices. If you have a rocket launcher that does 10 damage and a pistol that does 2 damage. You'll always use the rocket if there's no drawback. If you only have 2 rockets to fire but infinite pistol rounds, then deciding when to use the rocket is a more interesting choice. And I still get to choose when and where I use those two rockets. Applying a system of perks and drawbacks to your choices is a good way to actually make them legitimate choices.

WoF just doens't do that though, it's a random die roll that limits what you can do, and that's all it is. It's not even like a card game where I can elect to save cards for later. It's complexity for complexity's sake and exists only to cover up bad game design.

[PhoneLobster]

WTF are you talking about? THIS IS THE ENTIRE POINT BEHIND A RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

The Vancian system as done by D&D removes choice, too.

And that's where you are flat out wrong.

Vancian systems, and many other non-WoF systems remove choice, in a rather vague stretch of the definition, but only as they progress.

And the mechanism for that progression is not random change... it's player choices. My "removed choice" of not being able to cast a 4th fire ball for the day is removed because I made three whole additional choices of my own already.

In WoF that choice is removed constantly and from the very beginning of any period of adventures. Vancian does not remove my choice to cast my 1st, or even ANY Fireballs for a day, but WoF actually might well prevent me casting my first, or ANY fireballs. And when I DO get to my 4th fireball cast and WoF says no? It wasn't three other choices of mine in the past that caused that limitation, it was arbitrary dice rolls I have no control over.

Most importantly WoF will almost certainly prevent me from casting that one crucial fire ball that exact one time I really want to. And that's something almost no other resourcing system is going to do unless I actually personally made a poor or unlucky DECISION earlier.

That is all a VERY different kettle of fish when it comes to resource management and decision trees. So no, your argument that "Vancian is just as restrictive of choice only worse at other things too" is entirely wrong.

Why is being punished or rewarded for decisions you made. probably in a vacuum, two or three encounters ago so desirable?

Because your alternative to that happening SOMETIMES is being punished or rewarded for dice rolls CONSTANTLY that are DEFINITELY occurring in a vacuum rather than you know, just MAYBE so.

Basically you identify a problem... and just made it WORSE with WoF. That is not good.

It's a pretty dumb system which leads to counter-intuitive and anticlimatic behavior like people not using their sole level 4 spell against the BBEG because he expects ninjas to attack them later in the night.

That particular example is not something I would identify as a problem, it looks like a pretty valid choice actually. Especially if ninjas DO attack them later in the night.

Or people bailing out of a workday early in order to make themselves more powerful in aggregate.

Bailing out of the work day early is somewhat of a problem in say 3.x D&D. But largely because they make schizophrenic design decisions about what a work day should be, with a supposed intended balance point placed nowhere near the point that is strongly encouraged both by the precise charges per X mechanics AND by numerous actual abilities and spells that actually HELP shorten the working day more than they supposedly intended.

Meanwhile the "five minute working day, and we didn't intend for it to be that short" problem is not actually automatically inherit in every resource management system under the sun. You CAN have better formalized recharge cycles, you CAN have resourcing systems that do not actually have a "work day" at all.

Why do you want to have MORE abilities than that? That shit slows the game down too much.

Yes, actually choices slow the game down more than say flipping a coin and letting it decide. (you know, the WoF method).

But by that reasoning, hey, lets just remove ALL choice and substitute with die rolls! Things will run REALLY fast. Why you could for instance do the WoF maneuver thing AND use dice rolls to determine your targets! No wait, Frank ACTUALLY promoted that idea...

Look decision making can take time. And if a player GENUINELY has 14, hell even 4 or 5 choices that MIGHT all be optimal and ARE all genuinely reasonable options they might indeed take a while to decide.

But the reality of a diverse ability system, and human decision making is that generally you can expect them to rapidly prune their decision tree down to a fairly obvious smaller number of contenders, even if the tree started out pretty large. This should ESPECIALLY be the case where abilities are genuinely situationally good or bad.

And it's OK even desirable, if on many turns the obvious choices prune down to ONE, or even a particular combo over a specific number of turns, and that only SOMETIMES (ideally I feel about half the time, but your mileage may vary) should there be a less obvious final decision, and that will usually easily boil down to 2-3 choices.

It's workable, it's OK, people making the "What is my strongest appropriate choice of action?" decision after discarding some raft of obvious non-options for the current context is totally a good thing to have. And your alternative question "what did I roll this turn?" is actually a rather poor substitute and you really should feel bad about thinking it was a better alternative.

B) Depending on the WoF system you're proposing, you can still have access to a lot of choices. Having 4-6 distinct options to choose from is plenty.

That isn't a WoF system. That's a fucking mess.

No really. If WoF is actually rolling up a number of choices as large as that as a result and they REALLY are all valid viable choices that players might genuinely want to pick any one of... you have gone NOWHERE on your dreaded "option paralysis"

Meanwhile if players actually are capable of pruning that decision tree down rapidly to an obvious choice, or even obvious couple of choices... you basically no longer have a leg to stand on in your demonization of player choice as "paralysis".

And in the mean time you have done NOTHING with that "plenty of choice" to deal with the FACT that WoF may well never ever let my Fire Ball Wizard actually cast a fucking fire ball. And CERTAINLY will rarely if ever let him cast that one fire ball at that one particular single time that it would be particularly appropriate for him to do so.

And sorry Lago "But you might get to choose between an Ice Ball and a Lightning Ball and a Teleport and a Buff!" is NOT a valid excuse. It's a rather poor diversion.

[Username17]

Wow PL, that made no sense. I'm going to stop talking to you about this issue, because you make no sense on this issue.

To everyone else: PL has a serious case of grognarditis. While many of his accusations on many subjects are spot on, he has a certain tendency to go off on irrational temper tantrums about stuff that he doesn't like "because it is different". You're never going to get him to accept a non-Vancian resource management system for the same reason you'll never get him to accept a 3d6 RNG: that is an arbitrary line in the sand that will make him lose his shit for no reason.

It's actually important data. There are a certain number of people who won't accept any particular game mechanic for no logical reason, and you have to accept that. There are people who will accept random movement from a die but not from a spinner and vice versa. There's no actual difference between the two in the mathematic sense, but seriously there are people who cannot be convinced.

Phone Lobster has permanent rose colored glasses as regards 3e Wizard casting. For whatever reason he does not and will not remember the maladaptive responses that long lists of prepared spells engender in people. It's conceivably possible that he's never seen someone stare at a list of prepared spells for five minutes when it was supposed to be their turn only to give up and do something stupid like fireball or shoot a crossbow - but since I've actually read his after action reports I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Yes, PL has run into the very real problems that WoF addresses. He has run into them repeatedly and they really do make his life worse in an entirely real and measurable way. And he still won't ever accept WoF as a solution. And, this is really important, he won't ever accept it for no good reason. This comes down to the "you can't please everyone all the time" thing. It doesn't matter if you are literally and specifically addressing a real problem they really have, some people still won't like it. Old people stand up in crowds and shout "Keep your government hands off my medicare!" It's just something you have to accept.

-Username17