The Gaming Den

ruemere wrote: You're not getting my point because you try to oversimplify my words. It's like making a photo of a panorama, and complaining that it is two-dimensional.

No, we're not getting your point because you do not seem to know what words actually mean:

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama wrote:Wikipedia's Panorama Definition[/url]
]
A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "sight"), is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images or a three-dimensional model.

Google Result for Panaroma Definition, 2nd Bullet Point wrote: a picture or photograph containing a wide view.

ruemere wrote:Why I prefer this system over d20? Because under d20 the results are too simple, because if you're competent you never fail, and because a successes of two different people are the same. The success of an expert is the same as the success of Joe the Average.
And that's why I think that Godbound system is better for Godbound.

I would think the first point is a feature for a setting where you play demigods, not a bug. Like for example, Hercules damn well should 'never fail' at breaking down an ordinary door. If the PCs are at supposed to be at Exalted-esque power levels, then not only should they be able to do things that would be completely impossible for an average dude, they should be able to do them easily - in their areas of focus, at least.

On the second point - that's a question of implementation. While a d20-style check can be simply pass/fail, it can also have a series of escalating DCs to achieve progressively better results. And it doesn't seem that this system has any difference between Hercules succeeding at something and Joe Average succeeding at the same thing either - only the failures are (potentially) different.

ruemere wrote:The benefits of using this system are as follows:
- it's fast.
- it's fun for a GM because every time a player runs into a complication, a GM can be inventive (yes, it does sound in ears of doubting Thomases like a mandate for screwing players over),
- it's fun for a player, because you get to play a big-damn-hero, and at the same time you get a lot of problems thrown at you.
- everyone is encouraged to build - players create and develop their factions, you're essentially playing a godsim, with your character in a spotlight

If I turn to the system for a result, and it tells me to make something up on the fly, that's not fast.

I don't need the system to tell me to make something up. I can do that anytime I want without rolling dice and pretending they matter.

I don't consider Mr. Magoo to be a "big damn hero". When I kick down the door, I want to know whether the door's going to be kicked down. I don't want a "fun hilarious complication" that I'm completely unable to predict because I "don't succeed enough" all the damn time. If the GM needs to make shit up on the fly to "throw problems" at me, he needs to do more game prep.

What the tits do factions and godsims have to do with attribute checks? Does being the leader of the rogues' guild give me a +3 to Dex checks? Does raising an army give me a +4 to Strength? If so, that's cool and all, but it's not what we're talking about.

Josh_Kablack wrote:

ruemere wrote: You're not getting my point because you try to oversimplify my words. It's like making a photo of a panorama, and complaining that it is two-dimensional.

No, we're not getting your point because you do not seem to know what words actually mean:

Wikipedia's Panorama Definition wrote: A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "sight"), is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images or a three-dimensional model.

Google Result for Panaroma Definition, 2nd Bullet Point wrote: a picture or photograph containing a wide view.

You've turned your petty attack into quite a spectacular failure.
Instead of throwing Merriam-Webster at you, I'll just point out that the very definition you've quoted contains "a three-dimensional model" mention.

Apparently, it's one of my first posts, so I have to fight.

Regards,
Ruemere

Ice9 wrote:

ruemere wrote:Why I prefer this system over d20? Because under d20 the results are too simple, because if you're competent you never fail, and because a successes of two different people are the same. The success of an expert is the same as the success of Joe the Average.
And that's why I think that Godbound system is better for Godbound.

I would think the first point is a feature for a setting where you play demigods, not a bug. Like for example, Hercules damn well should 'never fail' at breaking down an ordinary door. If the PCs are at supposed to be at Exalted-esque power levels, then not only should they be able to do things that would be completely impossible for an average dude, they should be able to do them easily - in their areas of focus, at least.

On the second point - that's a question of implementation. While a d20-style check can be simply pass/fail, it can also have a series of escalating DCs to achieve progressively better results. And it doesn't seem that this system has any difference between Hercules succeeding at something and Joe Average succeeding at the same thing either - only the failures are (potentially) different.

Yes, that's the serious flaw - the system fails to address mundanes attempting to do stuff. However, as the gameplay focuses on the Exalted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the Godbound, it's fine... no, it's not fine, but it is serviceable.

Regardless of skill system, on more thorough read, the factions/courts/ruins and skills/attributes are quite independent of each other. Porting new bits to any other d20-based system should be quite simple, really.

And hey, how wuxia-iconic is this:

Godbound, lesser Gift of Sword wrote:Contempt of Distance Constant
Your movement action can take you to any point in reach, provided the path is unobstructed and there’s a target to hit at the end of the move. Foes too far away to reach in one round can be pursued over multiple rounds, but they must be attacked once reached. This pursuit can even extend into the air, supporting the hero until they defeat their enemy or choose to disengage, whereupon they land safely at a point below.

Regards,
Ruemere

Ruemere, fix your tags.

ruemere wrote:You're not getting my point because you try to oversimplify my words. It's like making a photo of a panorama, and complaining that it is two-dimensional.

I'm not oversimplifying, I'm cutting the crap.

ruemere wrote:I acknowledge that the system is flawed, I haven't denied its existence or usability - I have played and enjoyed AD&D 2nd edition over a significant span of time, dammit. People can and do use the rules, but they need to work around the problems.
The rudimentary mechanics of Godbound suit it better than d20 skill system. Note that this is my opinion, and it is based only on my personal experience. This means that it not necessarily replicable or applicable to your situation or to your experience.

I'm not saying a word against the AD&D system. I'm not interested in hashing out the specific merits and shortcomings of a mechanic that's been dead for 16 years, because at least it is a mechanic that will tell you whether or not you succeed at trying to do whatever it is you're trying to do without resorting to the power of imagination.

What I'm saying is that this specific horseshit bastardization of AD&D checks that you're claiming is so "fast" and "fun" for everyone explicitly abdicates its responsibility to provide impartial information about the results of actions in the game to the humans playing the story.

You explicitly said

ruemere wrote:the person with better PR skills is going to own this game

which means even you, on some level, understand that this abomination is not a mechanic at all.

You can deliver on an epic power fantasy without using d20 skill checks while still having an actual mechanic. Godbound does not provide a mechanic, so it less an RPG than it is a loose set of guidelines for freeform collaborative storytelling, at which point you might as well play Munchausen and save a lot of effort making scratches on character sheets that ultimately don't fucking mean anything.

ruemere wrote:My recommendation would be to steal faction rules, maybe a few items from the premise, maybe adapt a few combat options. Or wait and see for a kickstarter.

What the fuck? You just got done with your attempt to defend this lazy abortion of a skill subsystem, and in the very next paragraph you disavow it as something that might be worth stealing for use in another game? Why the fuck would you bother typing this equivocating textual diarrhea and who the fuck do you think you're fooling?

How does this game handle grappling, for combat and things like drunk centaurs running by to snatch wives.

as it's a retroclone, how is it different/better than ACKS

Having read the complete book, I'm disappointed. The mechanics are clunky and carry over some of the worst ideas about epic/deity-level play. The only saving grace is the sandboxing tools and advice.

DeadlyReed wrote:Having read the complete book, I'm disappointed. The mechanics (...) carry over some of the worst ideas about epic/deity-level play.

That sounds like an interesting tangent, what would those be?

Schleiermacher wrote:

DeadlyReed wrote:Having read the complete book, I'm disappointed. The mechanics (...) carry over some of the worst ideas about epic/deity-level play.

That sounds like an interesting tangent, what would those be?

Concur, let's hear it!

Mord wrote:...

Dude. I put a warning at the very beginning of the first post I made in this thread.

*plonk*
(and have a nice life)

Schleiermacher wrote:

DeadlyReed wrote:Having read the complete book, I'm disappointed. The mechanics (...) carry over some of the worst ideas about epic/deity-level play.

That sounds like an interesting tangent, what would those be?

Probably the gifts. Zeus owns other gods because his power (thunderbolts) make for convenient and effective ranged weapon.

A godbound who focuses on fighting (and selects gifts to subjugate others) can quickly become a master of a large geographical area because:
1. He wins confrontations.
2. He can delegate work to other, less martially inclined, godbound, keeping them busy (no spare influence or dominion points floating around) and profiting from their work.

Of course, if its politics and if some civilized code of conduct is established (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordia ... y_(Tai_Di)), the conquering barbarian may be eventually taken down by a group, but the core game does not plan that far. There are none, as far as I can tell, mechanisms that would enforce such balancing of scales.

Another thing is that the gifts do not come with ranking. When they clash, it may be difficult to adjudicate the conflict.

Regards,
Ruemere

Here's the latest version:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4qCW ... mFqSWEyMk0

Has version 1.1 instead of version 0.13

I honestly don't give a shit how many revisions it goes through. A house divided cannot stand and all that.

An OSR project is hamstrung by the fact that OSR projects are basically stupid - an engineering challenge to include known bad elements of code while trying to make the whole thing work in spite of that. If any of these people had previously demonstrated that they could write something new and modern and excellent and were legitimately doing this for the challenge, that would still be stupid, but I could at least understand. As is, this is senseless boasting by nobodies - people bragging that they can solve difficult math problems that the best and brightest have spent decades working on while pointedly refusing to take advantage in advances in modern computing or availing themselves of the reams and reams of solutions partial and complete that have been produced in the intermedium. This is like physicists who walk in cold to discussions of climate science or economics and insist that they can solve difficult problems that vex entire fields because they are simply that awesome. Except of course, OSR writers have shown no special facility with any other field, and there's no obvious justification for their incredible arrogance.

When it comes to AD&D and OD&D retroclonage and the genre inclusion of demigods, you run into an immediate and obvious problem: the Bend Bars / Lift Gates percentage. That shit didn't happen for no reason. It happened because the "attribute roll" system is completely incapable of resolving tasks that are not plausibly within the reach of normal people. There is no feat of strength that that system can output that would be a thing that I personally couldn't be reasonably expected to do. So if you wish to include people who are in any way extraordinarily strong, you need an entirely new system. Hence: the Bend Bars / Lift Gates percentage. If you want the game to model a Frost Giant having any chance at all of succeeding at a feat of strength that Frank Trollman in real life couldn't pull off more than half the time, you need a parallel system that kicks in new chances of success and failure for creatures with super human strength. And if you want a Titan to be able to do things that a Frost Giant cannot, you need a newer new system. And so on. And the same must happen if you want puzzles for extraordinary intelligences that can't be completed by the functionally retarded. And every other challenge for characters and monsters that are extraordinary in any way that is at all relevant to their ability to solve them.

If your game is supposed to revolve around characters being generally extraordinary, as any game where the characters are skinned as fucking demigods has committed itself to do, then you'd better have a very good solution to the action resolution system for extraordinary actions problem. Godbound doesn't have a good solution to this problem. It doesn't have a solution to the problem at all. It doesn't even have a Bend Bars/ Lift Gates kludge to work around the issues in narrow reference frames. It's simply an abdication of the very first requirement of designing such a game. Tracking version numbers of this waste of time is a waste of time.

-Username17

Godbound wrote:Record your hero's attribute modifiers. Usually, you don't apply your whole score to a relevant die roll. Instead, you just apply a bonus or penalty. If your attribute score is 3, your modifier for the attribute is -3. For scores of 4–5, its -2, for 6–8 it's -1, for 9–12 it's +0, for 13–15 it's +1, for 16–17 it's +2, and for a mighty score of 18, it's +3.

That's a thing I can't understand.

I mean, OK, the designer want that bonus obey to a bell curve : most people have +0, many people have +1, and only 0.5% of the people have +4. No problem with that.

The issue is : rolling 3d6 already gives a bell curve. If you want to create another random variable verifying a bell curve using the result of 3d6, this new variable can simply be a linear function of your 3d6. If you want the max result to be more exceptional, you simply use 4d6, or 3d10, or whatever. Anything else is needlessly complicated and thus, stupid: in order to make your system more transparent, it should be the simplest possible, and the simplest way to create any probability distribution is to let the dice create the curve you want, and then use a linear function to re-scale (... or the other way around: flat RNG and arbitrary function to get the shape you want).

Therefore, why do game designers still use dice to generate some random variable, and then apply an arbitrary non-linear function to generate the actual useful result ? Because Gygax did that, so it must be good ? Are they stupid or something ? Did their brain cease to function in 1975, so they can't use any mechanic that wasn't created at that time ?

GâtFromKI wrote:Therefore, why do game designers still use dice to generate some random variable, and then apply an arbitrary non-linear function to generate the actual useful result ? Because Gygax did that, so it must be good ? Are they stupid or something ? Did their brain cease to function in 1975, so they can't use any mechanic that wasn't created at that time ?

It's cargo cult game design and appeal to nostalgia. The entire reason for retroclones's existance is to make people in the late 30s/40s to feel like idiot teenagers again. And we did back then was to roll dice and to consult tables.

GâtFromKI wrote:Anything else is needlessly complicated and thus, stupid: in order to make your system more transparent, it should be the simplest possible, and the simplest way to create any probability distribution is to let the dice create the curve you want, and then use a linear function to re-scale (... or the other way around: flat RNG and arbitrary function to get the shape you want).

But the -3 to +3 range they listed is already a linear progression on top of a normal distribution, so they basically did what you proposed they should do unless I misunderstand what you are trying to say..

As to why modifiers in addition to attributes? Standard deviation and normal distribution. You need to keep your modifiers within 2 standard deviations or you will end up with "next to impossible"/"next to always happening" results which are both boring and pointless to roll on. You have more leeway with linear results, as is the case with single die rolls, where each result is equally likely but as you roll more than one die and add them together, you will have drastically different result distributions.

Jason wrote:

GâtFromKI wrote:Anything else is needlessly complicated and thus, stupid: in order to make your system more transparent, it should be the simplest possible, and the simplest way to create any probability distribution is to let the dice create the curve you want, and then use a linear function to re-scale (... or the other way around: flat RNG and arbitrary function to get the shape you want).

But the -3 to +3 range they listed is already a linear progression on top of a normal distribution, so they basically did what you proposed they should do unless I misunderstand what you are trying to say..

As to why modifiers in addition to attributes? Standard deviation and normal distribution. You need to keep your modifiers within 2 standard deviations or you will end up with "next to impossible"/"next to always happening" results which are both boring and pointless to roll on. You have more leeway with linear results, as is the case with single die rolls, where each result is equally likely but as you roll more than one die and add them together, you will have drastically different result distributions.

You are, since he's talking about the existence of the attributes. Retroclones have you roll a random variable (your attribute) and then beat a normal distribution out of it (your mods).

And the statistical points you talk about are making the presupposition that the attributes themselves do anything, as opposed to the modifiers. Since this is a retroclone and ability drain/damage isn't as prevalent as is it in 3.X, this is mostly untrue. Attributes as they are now exist as a vestigial bit of design kept as a sacred cow.

Jason wrote:But the -3 to +3 range they listed is already a linear progression on top of a normal distribution, so they basically did what you proposed they should do unless I misunderstand what you are trying to say..

You are misunderstanding the situation and talking gibberish.

The range where you get +1 is three numbers long, the range where you get +2 is two numbers long. But the numbers that you get +1 with are closer towards the middle, so they are more likely. There's no reason to have the bonus thresholds be different numbers of numbers apart. If you wanted the curve to be steeper, you could just roll different dice and get a steeper curve. The bonus thresholds could still follow a regular progression of some kind.

-Username17

There is a very simple reason. He copied the bonus table from BECMI. No design purpose only retocloning.

I didn't notice them to be different steps apart. My bad.

No advancements
AD&D Only
FINAL RETRECLONATION

ruemere wrote:a power pool (called Effort, used to power your abilities)

So it's a game about Hellenic heroes that cannot be used to narrate The Illiad because fifty seconds into combat "Ajax" runs out of might points and there's still another 12 hours of non-stop combat ahead. Got it.

P.D: I know, poking fun at retroclones is low-hanging fruit, and games like Numenera and Aberrant do this same fuckery. I know.

nockermensch wrote:It's cargo cult game design and appeal to nostalgia. The entire reason for retroclones's existance is to make people in the late 30s/40s to feel like idiot teenagers again. And we did back then was to roll dice and to consult tables.

I still don't understand, but I guess I'm a bit stupid.

What I expect from a retro-clone is to have the same feeling as the old games, but without their problems. I expect such a game to exist in Nostalgia Land, where everything is perfect because you don't remember what was wrong: if the retro-clone reminds me about the problems of the old games instead of hiding them, it is a failure. At that point, I can as well re-open my old books and play AD&D or Warhammer FRPG or CoC or whatever.