Help me actually understand Winds of Fate.

[Josh_Kablack]

Could somebody please save me a bunch of headache by doing the following:

1. Summarizing how Winds of Fate mechanics would/could/should/do work in a short, easy to understand post that someone only tangentially familiar with RPGs could grok?

2. Give me concrete examples of pre-existing games that use Winds of Fate or something similar ? RPGs would be preferred here, but card/board/video/giant frog games are also helpful.

3. Link to the best prior discussions about implementing Winds of Fate?


Thanks in advance.

[Username17]

1. WoF is simply a means of limiting actions randomly instead of using counters, timers, charges, endurance limits, or whatever. The simplest means of using it is to take super moves (such as a dragon's breath) and have it become available on a specific die roll result each round. This works out roughly to being the same as "usable very X rounds" except that you roll each round rather than having to track how many turns it has been since th last fire breath. A more complex system gives the player different options for every result, meaning that each round the player has different options (some of which may or may not be super).

2. 4th edition D&D uses a very simple WoF mechanic for the rechargeable super moves of team monster. 3.5 D&D uses a type II WoF system for the Crusader.

It ultimately doesn't make a lot of difference whether you are using cards or dice to generate your WoF results. Dice work better if you are generating a single result (such as whether th alpha strike is available or which of several pre-set maneuver lists can be accessed). Cards work better if you are trying to generate multiple independent options simultaneously.

-Username17

[Ice9]

The type that I've seen discussed most on here is where you have a grid with X rolls and Y columns, and each turn you roll 1dX. Then you can pick any move off the row that you rolled.

A major factor in that style is how your grid gets constructed. I favor "MtG Style", where you customize your grid from the available moves you have, but other people have suggested just picking Y different styles that each fill an entire column.

Another factor is when exactly the 1dX roll takes place. Doing it at the end of the previous turn gives you time to plan ahead of time (making combat faster and teamwork easier), but it also reveals that information to the other players and DM, which may or may not be appropriate for the premise (if the roll represents stance or visible magic energy, then sure - not so much if it represents hidden preparations or seeing opportunities open).

[Username17]

Basically you could draw your options out of a deck of cards. You could construct your own deck, and then each round you could draw a hand of options and select an option by playing it. But that's kind of a pain in the ass, especially when there are a bunch of unnamed goblins on the field.

So instead of literally drawing cards, you can make a list of hands that you could have, and then roll a die to determine which hand you got. This has the advantage of allowing the player to stack the hands so that they never get a hand completely full of turtle, and it also has the advantage of that you can handle a lot of hands simultaneously with a list of numbers. The drawback of course is that there is by definition no reassortment. Whatever hands you draw up on the chart are the only hands you could have.

Still, I think this is the way to go for otherwise card based play in a role playing game's tactical combat minigame.

-Username17

[BearsAreBrown]

Forgive the possible stupidity, but why is this system desirable? It seems like it's complex and time consuming for the purpose of limiting player choice. What am I missing?

[TheFlatline]

Forgive the possible stupidity, but why is this system desirable? It seems like it's complex and time consuming for the purpose of limiting player choice. What am I missing?

It eliminates resource management. Wizards don't necessarily need to memorize 3 3rd level spells per day and that's it. Instead, you can list fireball in three of the ten sets of options you have (for example), and thus it comes up about the same amount of times per day.

More importantly, it avoids spamming the same at-wills forever that 4th edition introduced. You don't have to worry about saving your super-powerful once a day ability, because god only knows when it's coming back up again. You use it when you have the opportunity.

The trick is to make tactically interesting options. The system breaks down if you have your option of 1D8+1 damage or fireball.

Also, reducing player choices isn't necessarily a bad thing. Everyone's played in a game where the wizard spends 5 minutes pouring over notes, sheets, and books, then shrugs and says "fuck it... Magic Missile for 2 missiles at 1D4+1". It's called decision paralysis. Too many tactical options slow the game down.

[Ice9]

Forgive the possible stupidity, but why is this system desirable? It seems like it's complex and time consuming for the purpose of limiting player choice. What am I missing?

Certainly if the options are too restricted (number of columns is too small, grid assignment is too rigid), then it just takes control from the player.

However, with a grid that you have the option to customize, and a reasonable number of choices each round, it's in the same boat as MtG - and nobody would say that doesn't have tactics.
AFAIK, the overall goal is to be able to have characters know a large number of moves overall without making combat drag to a crawl from lengthy decisions every turn.

[rampaging-poet]

Forgive the possible stupidity, but why is this system desirable? It seems like it's complex and time consuming for the purpose of limiting player choice. What am I missing?

Winds of Fate has two main advantages. First, it prevents Five Moves of Doom scenarios where players do the same thing every fight. It also serves as an alternative to spell points, combo meters, random assortments of tokens, and other fiddly resource management mechanics. The complexity of filling in a grid once and rolling a die (or making a deck once and drawing a hand) is less than or equal to that of subtracting mana from a pool, building up Rage for a super attack, or preparing about twenty spells for your wizard to cast that day.

The biggest difficulty is finding realistic reasons why Krusk couldn't use Mighty Cleave when he was surrounded and had to use Power Throw instead. There's no problem with magical attacks because we already accept the idea that dragons can't breathe fire every round and the wizard might not have a sleep spell ready right now, but martial characters on WoF can run into verisimilitude problems quickly.
The closest things I've seen for a solution to this are allowing players to set up grids such that they likely have something useful to do each round and moving fighter-types to more explicitly magical power sources.

Argh, I've been ninja'd. Oh well.

[name_here]

The fluff is that WoF results for fighting characters represent what they can reasonably manage, what with where everyone's swords happen to be at that exact moment and such.

[BearsAreBrown]

Now that I understand it, that seems like a really neat system.

Most TCGs are a variation of this system then, right? You build a deck but you randomly draw from it. Any other examples of full systems which use the mechanic?

[MfA]

I'd rather see the a character have access to a wide enough array of balanced abilities that a small change in context will already make the smart player chose a different ability himself. Doesn't prevent always using the most powerful ability as an opener, but there are different solutions for that.

[Josh_Kablack]

Thanks, this has been immensely helpful so far.

But I'm still looking for someone to provide links to relevant prior discussions....?

[Username17]

I'd rather see the a character have access to a wide enough array of balanced abilities that a small change in context will already make the smart player chose a different ability himself. Doesn't prevent always using the most powerful ability as an opener, but there are different solutions for that.

Uh yeah, whatever. You do that. Seriously: I double dog dare you to invent such a system. The reason why no system works like that is because it is fucking ridiculous.

Basically you've fallen into the Elennsar trap of wanting the mechanics to actually be the story instead of having the mechanics represent the story in an abstract fashion. In the story, Sir Beladere hit his opponent with a sword because he swung low instead of swinging high, and he chose to swing low instead of swinging high because that was a rational and intelligent choice based on the position of his opponent's sword and his own. But you can't actually have that happen like that. Sir Beladere has a fucking sword skill and he rolls fucking dice to determine whether he hits, and you decide whether he swung low and why after seeing the results. And you do that because if you were actually calculating sword positions you'd be there all fucking night and there's no guaranty that you'd end up with results that made any fucking sense.

When you give the player a very large number of options in a single combat round, it produces option paralysis. If you open the floodgates to allow a player to do anything they could ever possibly do in any round on every round, you either have to limit the total options ever in their life to a very limited and boring set or contend with hard option paralysis every single round.

Now let's talk about circumstances that could actually make there be a best option out of, say, 30 maneuvers. And worse: let's make it so that these circumstances vary enough that it's a different best option in each of 5 rounds of combat. Even if you're just checking binary states, you'd still need to check five of them before you could have 30 plus options. And that's sliding in very minimally since there are only 32 possible states in such a scenario. But you still haven't made the player's selection of one attack or another "smart" - you've just made it time consuming. After deciding that the enemy is "near" instead of "far" and "extended" instead of not, and that you are not extended and blah blah blah, you have a an information return of "11001" or something, and that just corresponds to "option 25 (overhead smash)". There's nothing intelligent about that, your best choice is just computable. It doesn't start actually being an intelligent choice until there are so many variables that it is incalculable - and I can pretty much guaranty that in such a situation most players are just going to say "fuck it" and use their favorite maneuver over and over again.

It's understandable to want your character's sword blows to hit instead of miss because you were smart and made good choices, but that's not how it works. That's not how it has ever worked, and that's not how it ever will work. You hit instead of miss because your character has a good swording number and you rolled well.

-Username17

[Murtak]

Or, to put it differently: if there is a "right" choice to make, your system is already flawed right there. You want to give your players options, not take them away.

[DragonChild]

Thanks, this has been immensely helpful so far.

But I'm still looking for someone to provide links to relevant prior discussions....?

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51229

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=82657

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51469

(in vague order of applicability)

[TheFlatline]

I'd rather see the a character have access to a wide enough array of balanced abilities that a small change in context will already make the smart player chose a different ability himself. Doesn't prevent always using the most powerful ability as an opener, but there are different solutions for that.

99.9% of every gamer on the planet has never been in a general melee, none of us have ever seen a fight with wizards or trolls in it, and none of us really have ever been in a swordfight where our lives are at stake.

Therefore, the odds of you or any of us actually being able to describe/model a fight in enough detail to make such subtle variations in a moment-to-moment flow (that has to be broken down into turns since real-time is impossible) are incredibly long.

Which is precisely why we abstract out combat systems. Otherwise we could solve every combat encounter with a round of Marvel vs Capcom 3.

Oh, and as for a reasonable explanation for why you could cleave this round instead of last, it's a combination of opening and battlefield awareness. Sometimes in the heat of battle your brain just turns off. It's actually pretty common. Go head over to a laser tag hall and jump into a game with a bunch of new people. I promise in that group of 20-30 people, you'll have 4 or 5 who get utterly shell-shocked by the immediacy of the moment and will wander around, not shooting, not defending, in a straight daze. Even veteran players will sometimes get caught up in the moment and lose situational awareness.

And thus with a little work you have an extremely easy way of representing power curve in a WoF system: You either increase the number of times you can list a given power (so after a point it's promised you'll *always* have that power no matter how you roll, representing a specialty), or your matrix grid enlarges giving you more options at any given moment.

And that's a power curve that you can design that is "universal", while still having drastically different powers.

[MfA]

Not pissing up wind is still more intelligent than doing it (I say as I am starting an argument with FrankTrollman) however obvious the correct choice.

HP/AC/saves/resistances/abilities/CAN (and level of uncertainty in the knowledge there of) of multiple monsters and PCs and their relative positions ... the amount of variables and fuzziness in an average combat situation is huge. In all but the most trivial situations the optimal move is incalculable, which is not to say it won't often be obvious ... but is that so bad?

Why is having only a small set of obvious best manoeuvres for a given situation when those situations occur randomly any worse than having a small random set of available manoeuvres? Either way most of the choice is made for you ...

[Murtak]

HP/AC/saves/resistances/abilities/CAN (and level of uncertainty in the knowledge there of) of multiple monsters and PCs and their relative positions ... the amount of variables and fuzziness in an average combat situation is huge. In all but the most trivial situations the optimal move is incalculable, which is not to say it won't often be obvious ... but is that so bad?

Why is having only a small set of obvious best manoeuvres for a given situation when those situations occur randomly any worse than having a small random set of available manoeuvres? Either way most of the choice is made for you ...

But that is not what you previously said. You said you wanted a balanced set of choices, with small changes in context leading to an obvious choice for a smart player. Now you are saying that you do not want the best choice to be easily calculable, which is almost opposite of your original statement. And this time I agree with you - the "correct move" should - at the very least - be hard to calculate.

But you can have all of your variables and fuzziness on top of either a set of always available moves or on top of a WoF or card mechanic. The question is not whether or not we want obvious choices. We don't. The question is whether or not we want characters to be able to spam the same choice over and over again.

[hogarth]

Why is having only a small set of obvious best manoeuvres for a given situation when those situations occur randomly any worse than having a small random set of available manoeuvres? Either way most of the choice is made for you ...

I think you either like the randomness or you don't. Whether your moves are randomly selected or not, you're still picking your best move based on a flowchart in most cases.

Suppose your fighter has three moves A, B and C where you prefer A to B and B to C. Then your combat will look something like:

• In 3.5: A, A, A, A, A, ...
• In 4E: A, B, C, C, C, C, ... (assuming C is an at-will) or A, A, A, A, ... (assuming A is an at-will)
• In Winds of Fate: C, B, A, C, A, ... (average case) or A, B, A, A, C, ... (lucky case) or C, C, C, B, A, C, ... (unlucky case)

Personally, I'm fairly risk-averse -- I dislike the unlucky streaks more than I like the lucky streaks. Some people think it's more "organic", though (cf. discussions of rolling stats vs. point buy).

Now you could say "My Winds of Fate system is going to be so great that A, B and C are equally awesome all the time", but designing separate-but-equally-useful powers is the tricky part and it has nothing to do with Winds of Fate.

[MfA]

You said you wanted a balanced set of choices, with small changes in context leading to an obvious choice for a smart player. Now you are saying that you do not want the best choice to be easily calculable

"In all but the most trivial situations the optimal move is incalculable, which is not to say it won't often be obvious"

I'm merely saying that it generally won't be calculable, want has nothing to do with it. Just like you can intuit basic poker strategies from playing enough games, but proving them effective analytically requires a graduate level of understanding of game theory.

[fectin]

Actually, the German fencing team swept the olympics a couple decades ago by doing something similar what MfA suggested. They reduced basically everything to a four-way decision tree, and trained three levels deep into reflexes.

Although, I think MfA may have been suggesting something broader like Rock-Paper-Scissors martial arts styles.

[Username17]

OK MfA, I have no idea what the fuck you're arguing for anymore. Earlier you were saying that all abilities should be available all the time and that subtle differences in the tactical situation should lead intelligent players to cycle through different moves. Now you're saying that the ideal move to be used in any circumstance is unknowable so people should just use whatever the feel like.

As far as I can tell you are rejecting restricting play choice but also rejecting giving players situations that demonstrably favor one ability over another. Meaning that the ultimate result is that you seem to be arguing for a situation in which players have a bunch of crap written on their sheet but in practice they just use whatever move they are most familiar with over and over again because it's always available and it's probably about as good as anything else they did. What the fuck? That sounds like the worst possible scenario. On where choices don't matter and characters behave in a boring and predictable fashion.

Resource management exists so that players are presented with a choice each turn and so that players announce difference actions each turn. WoF provides those benefits without requiring players to keep rack of resource data from turn to turn. Your bleak vision of life without resource management provides nothing but left-click-spam.

-Username17

[hogarth]

OK MfA, I have no idea what the fuck you're arguing for anymore.

This is probably oversimplifying things, but I think he's saying that he prefers a system where choosing between options is interesting, even if that choice results in using the same move five times in a row.

Resource management exists so that players are presented with a choice each turn and so that players announce difference actions each turn. WoF provides those benefits without requiring players to keep rack of resource data from turn to turn. Your bleak vision of life without resource management provides nothing but left-click-spam.

If the only thing you do is change the left click to have a random result rather than the same result every time, that wouldn't really fix anything. If Superman is boring when he punches Gorilla Grodd five times in a row, it wouldn't particularly make him more interesting if he switched to "punch, heat vision, heat vision, super breath, punch".

I'm sure there's room in the Winds of Fate system to make things more interesting, but just adding a random element by itself isn't sufficient.

[MfA]

Now you're saying that the ideal move to be used in any circumstance is unknowable so people should just use whatever the feel like.

No, I literally didn't say that.

[BearsAreBrown]

If Superman is boring when he punches Gorilla Grodd five times in a row, it wouldn't particularly make him more interesting if he switched to "punch, heat vision, heat vision, super breath, punch".

Then when is Superman ever interesting?