The New School Manifesto

[Judging__Eagle]

If the math isn't being examined in depth, why pick this specific RNG component?

In my experience there is a very strong correlation between game designers who don't examine their math and it's implications in depth and game designers who use punishingly complex and counter productive math in their base mechanics.

There is also a strong correlation between players who will accept such punishing and counter productive math in a game's base mechanics and the players who show themselves to be least equipped to understand how the fuck that mechanic even works or WTF it means.

Take what message you want from that.

But for me it is certainly absolutely no surprise after seeing that mechanic to find that the guy who made it doesn't even know off the top of his head the sorts of results it is likely to produce.

Quoted for stating the caressing truth.

[Neurosis]

Assuming this isn't a troll thread, I'm a little curious to know why d10s are the dice of choice for this. If you're checking for numerical matches, 10's a pretty significant number of digits. And I find most d10s kind of cumbersome. They aren't platonic solids, and it's easier for them to tip over.

The one real upside I can think of is that you might be able to do some kind of substitution where you can use playing cards instead of dice (one of the things that drove the brief period in which I was interested in Framewerk) but I'm not sure how well that would work in this system.

If the math isn't being examined in depth, why pick this specific RNG component?

For all of these reasons, it seems like d6 would be hugely preferable for this system.

Of course, I do feel like "I'm staying with d10s because d10s just feel better to me" is a perfectly valid argument for the developer to make.

[TheFlatline]

I think that this thread has some good points about the system and I'll leave it at that.

It's not as obtuse as it's made out to be.

No they don't. Actually, having checked to see that this is in fact part of a troll thread shitstorm by the Something Awful dumbasses, I think TheFlatline is right. This is a troll thread.

The OP is just saying stupid shit to offend us so that the Something Awful types can circle jerk each other some more. I predict that we're about to be invaded by a bunch more dumbasses that I'm going to have to put on ignore. Last year there was an invasion of trolls from there, I'm guessing it's just time.

-Username17

The MTP quote is what spoiled what was up to that point a halfway decent troll.

[Mask_De_H]

TradGoons are the worst Goons.

I think you're just misguided, Kemper, but at the Gaming Den, mechanics are paramount. You have to know how the crunch of your game works before you present it here. At least understand the math of your resolution systems.

I know Goons like ORE and say it's fun, but it's fun in spite of its ruleset. The Den tries to make games that are fun and functional because of the ruleset underneath it. Read the "Finding an Optimal Dice Resolution Mechanic" thread to get a good sense of how Den argumentation works and how various dice rolling systems actually work.

[Neurosis]

I think you're just misguided, Kemper, but at the Gaming Den, mechanics are paramount. You have to know how the crunch of your game works before you present it here. At least understand the math of your resolution systems.

This is what I always thought, but when I posted my rules here expecting them to be brutally ripped apart in a highly educational way, what I instead got was mainly a lengthy discussion of the fluff, how it needs more fluff and analysis of the game's underlying themes. My mind was kind of blown.

[Koumei]

Apparently Kemper "isn't really a Goon". According to my inside sources (ie some guy on the Internet who follows the grognards thread) Kemper is just advertising his system pretty much everywhere gaming related, including here, and including there.

We might actually be safe. And given last time it was the 4E crowd and 4E is now declared dead... I don't want to be optimistic but maybe the Den will only have the usual trolls and arguments.

[Kemper Boyd]

I'll try to throw a bit of a general answer here since there's been quite a few posts since yesterday, which makes me happy.

I genuinely had no idea what people talk about when saying "Magical Tea Party". It's not a term I've come across before, really. Kind of like hearing someone use "DTAS" for the first time. The whole trolling thing, well, to me the idea that someone uses months of time to write a game setting, do some rules thinking, blogging, setting up a Kickstarter and posting on several forums to troll one of the forums, I think you can use Occam's Razor on that one.

If dice-matching mechanics most definitively have the downside of having somewhat intricate probability calculation when it comes to some results, last year's testing (light testing, since it was just playing a campaign using the rules, not using a testing process) shows that dice-matching is fast and easy to grasp for many people who haven't played RPG's. It's one of the goals really: make the game easy to learn for new players. My friend Andri Erlingsson is actually using a similar dice-matching system (that uses d6's) to design a game aimed at younger children, and playtesting shows that it's easy enough to learn. Going for pattern recognition instead of calculation, having dice to count instead of numbers to count: it makes the dice rolls faster in general, compared to D20 or D6 where you almost always need to add numbers to get your final result. This is why stuff like Shadowrun can have rather quick task resolution.

Why I decided on the d10: well, it was either d10 or d6, both work. However, I like the d10 more, since there's some stuff you can do there with the basic probability range that doesn't work as well with d6's. Such as since with large pools, you're highly likely to have more than one match, so we can use that to do some stuff that's not yet in a presentable shape.

Frankly, the reason I'm focusing on presenting setting as opposed to presenting crunch, is that I feel that setting is the number one selling point I got anyway. This is what people have told me most of the time.

And I like getting feedback, despite knowing that some people are more concerned about some stuff which I don't really focus on a lot. I try listening to people's concerns, I make notes, I compare the feedback relating to what I want to achieve. This is one of the reasons I believe in playtesting through a proper process: otherwise I'd just shove out a barebones ruleset and give it to people to try out. However, crowdsourced testing is rarely good since you almost never get exact feedback.

Since people here tend to care about probabilities a lot, I talked with a friend and he's going me a huge probability chart whenever he has the time. When I get that, I'll share that here. Maybe you'd like it.

I do admit, this thread has occasionally been a rather frustrating experience, since I don't grasp the concerns of people all the time. I do get that there's sort of cultural differences involved in design, maybe it's just that and not me being broken on some fundamental level, especially since I've had people review the stuff I'm working on in private (people who do editing, technical writing and a few rpg designers too) and generally the feedback has been good.

Of course, no game is everyone's cup of tea. I try to include various styles of play in the final product, but there's always going to be people who are not intereested. And that's perfectly fine: there's no such thing as a perfect game. There's just games that reach their design goals.

[Username17]

Dude, the issue is that there is a very simple test for whether a design is capable of not being shit: ask the designer what the parts do. We gave you that test, and you failed it. You don't know what the parts of your system do individually, which means that the whole has exactly as much chance of being a useful machine as any other random collection of driftwood and stones washed up on the beach.

If, as a designer, you can't tell people definitively what the pieces do, you're not a designer. You're at best an evolver - someone tinkering with essentially random changes in the vain hope that they'll end up with a working whole. You presented your core mechanic and we asked you very simple questions about what it did, and you couldn't answer. And you still can't answer. You are grossly unqualified to work with the parts and tools you have selected, because you can't even explain what they do.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

... a few rpg designers too) and generally the feedback has been good.

I'm going to try to be gentle. But it isn't going to work.

There are a LOT of rpg designers in the world. Almost every remotely experienced GM ever at least dabbles, and commonly thinks overly highly of their own dabbling and calls themselves an "rpg designer".

Guys who knock up a two page "rules lite" system with nothing but one key mechanic that is actually made out of ass and makes their game WORSE than if they had just written "Make stuff up!" on one half of a torn napkin and go and post it on the internets... call themselves RPG designers.

Indeed knocking up a two page RPG on an internet site can even get you a tiny but vocal fan following of idiots remarkably easily. And in a local gaming community normal every day real life people will seem unduly impressed and say "Wow he has a game on the internet! He is a Game Designer" even if the game has been played, in total, world wide, about 6 times ever and every single game has resulted in massive failure due to a broken basic mechanic.

Even "big" RPG Designers, outside of the giant names like D&D (which are full of incompetents too)... have often designed games that are only played ever a total number of times ranking into MAYBE low hundreds MAYBE and even then a large portion or even ALL of those games could fail due to a variety of mechanical difficulties and they are STILL regarded as "successful" RPG Designers.

So when you say "people looked at my game and thought it was cool, and some of them called themselves RPG Designers!" it's pretty meaningless. People, especially in the non-specific sense, are stupid. If people cannot even give a reason why your mechanic is good and does good things and YOU cannot give a reason, or the even numbers behind it... what makes you think your mechanic is any good?

You CAN sit down and use math and reason to determine WHAT sort of influence a mechanic has on game play. And that sort of material is reproducible and understandable to other intelligent critics. If you have had reviewers who put ANY thought into feed back your game then you should already have such material to show us about WHY they thought your game was "good".

And if you don't then I am simply going to assume ALL your reviewers were nothing more than being polite or being idiots. The RPG hobby is unfortunately full of them, which isn't a problem up until it comes to play testing or surveying a bad mechanic.

Consider for a second. Something close to a majority of real life RPG players will pretty much say ANYTHING you show them is cool just to be nice. If you got an answer from them about your RPG rules that COULD have applied to ANY RPG, even one YOU think is bad, a response like say "It seems pretty cool..." then the review you received is without value.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I'll try to throw a bit of a general answer here since there's been quite a few posts since yesterday, which makes me happy.

I genuinely had no idea what people talk about when saying "Magical Tea Party". It's not a term I've come across before, really. Kind of like hearing someone use "DTAS" for the first time. The whole trolling thing, well, to me the idea that someone uses months of time to write a game setting, do some rules thinking, blogging, setting up a Kickstarter and posting on several forums to troll one of the forums, I think you can use Occam's Razor on that one.

If dice-matching mechanics most definitively have the downside of having somewhat intricate probability calculation when it comes to some results, last year's testing (light testing, since it was just playing a campaign using the rules, not using a testing process) shows that dice-matching is fast and easy to grasp for many people who haven't played RPG's. It's one of the goals really: make the game easy to learn for new players. My friend Andri Erlingsson is actually using a similar dice-matching system (that uses d6's) to design a game aimed at younger children, and playtesting shows that it's easy enough to learn. Going for pattern recognition instead of calculation, having dice to count instead of numbers to count: it makes the dice rolls faster in general, compared to D20 or D6 where you almost always need to add numbers to get your final result. This is why stuff like Shadowrun can have rather quick task resolution.

Why I decided on the d10: well, it was either d10 or d6, both work. However, I like the d10 more, since there's some stuff you can do there with the basic probability range that doesn't work as well with d6's. Such as since with large pools, you're highly likely to have more than one match, so we can use that to do some stuff that's not yet in a presentable shape.

Frankly, the reason I'm focusing on presenting setting as opposed to presenting crunch, is that I feel that setting is the number one selling point I got anyway. This is what people have told me most of the time.

And I like getting feedback, despite knowing that some people are more concerned about some stuff which I don't really focus on a lot. I try listening to people's concerns, I make notes, I compare the feedback relating to what I want to achieve. This is one of the reasons I believe in playtesting through a proper process: otherwise I'd just shove out a barebones ruleset and give it to people to try out. However, crowdsourced testing is rarely good since you almost never get exact feedback.

Since people here tend to care about probabilities a lot, I talked with a friend and he's going me a huge probability chart whenever he has the time. When I get that, I'll share that here. Maybe you'd like it.

I do admit, this thread has occasionally been a rather frustrating experience, since I don't grasp the concerns of people all the time. I do get that there's sort of cultural differences involved in design, maybe it's just that and not me being broken on some fundamental level, especially since I've had people review the stuff I'm working on in private (people who do editing, technical writing and a few rpg designers too) and generally the feedback has been good.

Of course, no game is everyone's cup of tea. I try to include various styles of play in the final product, but there's always going to be people who are not intereested. And that's perfectly fine: there's no such thing as a perfect game. There's just games that reach their design goals.

Occam's Razor accepted, though I think you underestimate just how far some people are willing to go for a good troll.

I'd like you to take a look at something. This is a game design flowsheet that a lot of people here use (full thread here: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=31521).

This is in reference to the perplexing morass that the 40k design thread got to. Here's a step by step of designing a game.

Name the PCs

In D&D the characters are called a "party", which stands for "war party" and it colors the entire system. In Shadowrun it's a "Team", in Vampire it's a "coterie". If you name the PCs a "squad", a "pack", or whatever, it matters.

Step 2: Write up a Six Person Party

Seriously. Using words, not numbers, write up a six person party. Think about what each character contributes to the story, to the action, to completion of mission objectives.

• Does everyone have something to do? If not, start over.

Remember that it is entirely possible that you'll have 6 players or more at the table. If there is a structural impediment to the way you've designed the character "classes" such that you can't fit six players into a whole where each contributes, it's not going to work as an RPG.

Step 3: Write up a Three Person Party

Again, using words not numbers outline a group of potential player characters. Only now you've only got three characters to work with. Think about how the group can respond to challenges and complete mission objectives.

• Is there a talent critical to the group's success that that is missing from the group you've outlined? If so, start over.

Remember that people don't show up sometimes. Also, some games are small. If the game can't survive without a full team, it can't survive.

Step Four: Outline an Adventure

Using words, not numbers or mechanics, outline an adventure. Block it out in terms of time. Figure that you have somewhere between 2 and 6 hours. Any discussions that happen "in character" are resolved slower than real time. Any tactical combat is likewise resolved in much less than real time. Travel is handled almost instantly unless you make players describe in detail that they are "looking for traps/ambushes/their ass with both hands" - in which case it takes practically forever.

• Are there substantial blocks of time that one or more characters have nothing to add to the situation? If so, start over.
  
• If you use major "mini-games" such as puzzle solving or tactical combat, is every character able to contribute significantly to these mini-games? If not, are these mini-games extremely short? If the answer to both questions is no, start over.

If you have a tactical combat mini-game (or the equivalent) that takes up a significant amount of the overall game it will inevitably become the benchmark by which a character's worth is measured. Characters who don't measure up... don't measure up.

Players who don't have anything meaningful or valued for their characters to do will wander off and play computer games.

Step Five: Write out a campaign

It doesn't have to span years of epic tales or any of that crap, but it does need to have a story arc and outline a potential advancement scheme as you envision it.

• Does everyone have a roughly equivalent available advancement scheme? It's OK if noone advances during the campaign or even if negative advancement accumulates as people run out of ammunition and get injured. But if you envision some players going on to become a world dominating sorcerer lord and the other characters becoming better dog trainer - start over.

It's really frustrating when one player is flying around fighting gods and other characters are not. It really isn't better if the game ends up that way than if the players start off with that kind of disparity.

Step Six: Choose a Base System

Based on your previous work, consider what base system would best correspond to what it is that you're doing. There are a lot of game systems that you just plug numbers into (d20, HERO, SAME, BESM, etc. and whatever); there are a number of other systems which work fine for what they do and can be adapted to whatever it is that you want to do (Shadowrun, Feng Shui, WFRP, Paranoia, etc.). Consider the play dynamics and character distinctions that you want and the limitations of the system in question. If you want some characters picking up and throwing cars, d20 doesn't work. If you want all the characters at roughly human strength, HERO doesn't work.

• If you intend the game to have a high and permanent lethality rate? If so, start over if your system takes a long time to generate characters.
  
• Can you figure out how to model all the abilities that characters need to fulfill your concept in your system? If not, start over.

Step Seven: Do the Math

Once you've got this going, you can do the laborious, but not difficult task of actually plugging numbers in to generate the abilities you've concepted.

• Run the numbers. Have the numbers you've generated actually provided you with a reasonable chance of producing the story arcs you're looking for? If not, start over.
  
• Check yourself against the Random Number Generator. If high values that are achievable within the campaign can't lose to the low numbers also available in the campaign, you don't actually have a "game" at that point you just have "I win" - is that OK for the situations it comes up in? If not...

-Username17

Do you think you could articulate what a typical 3 and 6 person party might look like for your game, then summarize an adventure and campaign? I'd like to get a better idea of what PCs do in this game.

[DSMatticus]

If dice-matching mechanics most definitively have the downside of having somewhat intricate probability calculation when it comes to some results, last year's testing (light testing, since it was just playing a campaign using the rules, not using a testing process) shows that dice-matching is fast and easy to grasp for many people who haven't played RPG's. It's one of the goals really: make the game easy to learn for new players.

I'lll be way more civil thank Frank about it, but you're still throwing around a bad idea here. Just because you can describe it in a few sentences doesn't mean the implications are easily understood. I can tell you that there are giant slabs of rock drifting around beneath us, but it's a far leap from that to "and that's where mountains come from."

Matching is a mathematically opaque method, especially if you are asking players to do anything other than the simple boolean test "is there one or more matches?" When the DM says "get two matches on a 7d10 roll," how do the people at the table know whether that is an easy or hard task? When you throw 1d20+11 vs 17 in D&D, you know you have to roll at least a 6, giving you 15 numbers you succeed on and 5 you don't. When you throw 8d6 in Shadowrun, you know you can expect 8/3=2.6 on average. Most people probably won't know their odds of getting X hits on N dice, but there is at least a base where they have some rational method of assessing their chances of success or failure. If you ask people to get X matches on Nd10, they will have absolutely no freaking idea what their chances of success or failure are.

Now, the part where Frank asked you to assess the probabilities of your own system and you fubar'd is a scary thing. Because as a game designer, you do eventually have to do the crunch, and that means finding out things like, "When players swing their weapon, they should hit an equally skilled opponent X% of the time. What kind of roll should they be doing to make that math happen?" You couldn't answer that question. That's bad.

Crunch has this reputation in the amateur RPG design community as some horrible evil thing that's only there for the char-optimizers. But the actual fact of the matter is that getting the crunch right stops shit like having housecats who beat level 1 commoners in a straight up fight. It is how you make the system give you the results you want. If you can't be arsed to get the math right, your mechanics will drag your game down. And neither you nor your players will know how to use the probability of your overly complex resolution mechanic to tell the stories they want to tell, because when you start counting number of matches/matches on multiple categories, the math gets nightmarish.

Or to put it in terms that match your 'manifesto': intuitive resolution mechanics are empowering for DM's and players. They let them use your system to tell the stories they want to tell because they have a better understanding of what the system will output and how to use it to craft their shared narrative. </buzzword-laden rant>

[Kemper Boyd]

Probabilities and such:

How much does knowing exact probabilities matter? Not much, in my experience, when the basic rolls just demand one match (that you can use a pretty easy chart to judge, the one posted previously in this thread).

In my experience, people don't really calculate exact probabilities at the game table anyway. They make educated guesses, unless the system is really implicit in making probabilities apparent, which i guess you can only do in system that use something like percentage-based rolls like BRP.

Can you make an educated guess about something like "how likely am I to get three dice with matching numbers when I roll 8 dice?" Most def, lets roll. Experience with the system counts for a lot, and while most gamers might not be initially familiar with dice-matching, it's easy to grasp through playing.


Systemwise, you have a fairly good baseline in the chance of getting one match with a given amount of dice, so let's build on that baseline, account for outliers but don't make basic successes based on getting outliers. Build character creation guidelines around telling people what they need to pick to make their their choices educated and valid.

[DSMatticus]

They make educated guesses, unless the system is really implicit in making probabilities apparent, which i guess you can only do in system that use something like percentage-based rolls like BRP.

They can't make educated guesses about your system because the math is unintuitive. The system is a black box to them, and they can only make vague guesses.

Experience with the system counts for a lot, and while most gamers might not be initially familiar with dice-matching, it's easy to grasp through playing.

Experience doesn't count for anything. Human beings suck at probability. I have a player who spent so much time bitching about shitty rolls one session that I got pissed off and went back and averaged his d20 rolls to shut him up (it was an IRC game, easy to do). He was rolling better than average. Our brains are biased to remember certain events more than others, so when it comes time for us to "guess the odds from experience," we fail miserably like a bunch of idiots.

If your system only asks the simple question "is there one or more matches?" then your odds are a one dimensional array of 2-9 or so (anything above 9 is just approaching 100%). That's super easy, and you can put it in a table which people will easily memorize. Unfortunately, your resolution mechanic produces almost no meaningful results. It doesn't have margins of success. It can't handle opposed rolls for high skill values (leads to deadlock as chances of success approach 100% for each). Introducing margins (number of matches) solves those problems, but makes your probability computation far more difficult to compute and makes your table 2-dimensional with 40+ entries that people can't memorize anymore. It isn't even obvious how many matches you should expect, like it is in Shadowrun (die pool / 3).

[Lokathor]

There is also a strong correlation between players who will accept such punishing and counter productive math in a game's base mechanics and the players who show themselves to be least equipped to understand how the fuck that mechanic even works or WTF it means.

Hey this happened just the other day with me in the Earthdawn thread. That's 1/1, which is 100% of the time.

Hypothesis confirmed.

[Kemper Boyd]

Experience doesn't count for anything. Human beings suck at probability. I have a player who spent so much time bitching about shitty rolls one session that I got pissed off and went back and averaged his d20 rolls to shut him up (it was an IRC game, easy to do). He was rolling better than average. Our brains are biased to remember certain events more than others, so when it comes time for us to "guess the odds from experience," we fail miserably like a bunch of idiots.

Actually, you're talking about confirmation bias which relates to pattern recognition (and why matching dice is easy, incidentally). People are pretty good at getting a grasp on things like "I'll probably not have two different matches if I roll 4d" and "with 8d I have a pretty good shot at getting two different matches". So I don't see a problem there.

Unfortunately, your resolution mechanic produces almost no meaningful results. It doesn't have margins of success. It can't handle opposed rolls for high skill values (leads to deadlock as chances of success approach 100% for each). Introducing margins (number of matches) solves those problems, but makes your probability computation far more difficult to compute and makes your table 2-dimensional with 40+ entries that people can't memorize anymore. It isn't even obvious how many matches you should expect, like it is in Shadowrun (die pool / 3).

Actually, the beauty of this dice mechanic is that you can translate results of a roll into lots of things. For instance, you have the variables of number of different matches, how many dice in a match and even what number the match has. And you can translate those into lots of things, while keeping the core mechanism of "roll dice, try to get matching numbers" simple and clean. At the same time, you get the advantages of keeping all the variables visible on the table (unlike say D20 where you need to add and subtract modifiers to your roll) and you can also minimize the amounts of dice rolls since you can use the amount of variables present to represent different aspects of the result.

For instance, your attack roll includes where you hit someone and how hard you hit them. Instead of three different dice rolls you get away with just one.

And the elegance of that far outweights the minor deal of having exact probabilities hard to calculate on the fly.

[DSMatticus]

Actually, you're talking about confirmation bias which relates to pattern recognition (and why matching dice is easy, incidentally). People are pretty good at getting a grasp on things like "I'll probably not have two different matches if I roll 4d" and "with 8d I have a pretty good shot at getting two different matches". So I don't see a problem there.

Confirmation bias is the point. Learning the odds of getting X matches on an Nd roll by experience (which is what you suggested) is heavily subject to confirmation bias, because they will forget the times they got uneventful 2-matches on 8d and remember the times they got eventful 1-matches on 8d. People are bad at learning probabilities by experience. You can tell, because the lottery is a thing that exists. They are good at learning probabilities by mathematical heuristics. Like "one third of my dice should be hits."

Actually, the beauty of this dice mechanic is that you can translate results of a roll into lots of things. For instance, you have the variables of number of different matches, how many dice in a match and even what number the match has. And you can translate those into lots of things, while keeping the core mechanism of "roll dice, try to get matching numbers" simple and clean. At the same time, you get the advantages of keeping all the variables visible on the table (unlike say D20 where you need to add and subtract modifiers to your roll) and you can also minimize the amounts of dice rolls since you can use the amount of variables present to represent different aspects of the result.

If you want to include a probability table in your book now, you now have multiple tables with dozens of entries each. See, you can't simultaneously say:
"The system is easy to understand for players because it only looks for the presence of one-matches," and
"the system produces complex results because it looks for more than the presence of one-matches." That's just contradicting yourself to have the best of both worlds.

Either the resolution test is simple, and the players understand the probabilities, or you add shit and doing the odds in your head becomes intractable.

[Fuchs]

Probabilities and such:

How much does knowing exact probabilities matter? Not much, in my experience, when the basic rolls just demand one match (that you can use a pretty easy chart to judge, the one posted previously in this thread).

It matters a lot. As a GM, I need to know what the odds are that my group will succeed at a task. Whether they hit an enemy on average 1 out of 10 tries, or 5 out of 10 tries matters a damn lot.

Even if you discount numbers, a game where you miss your target 9 out of 10 times has much, much different feel to it than one where you hit 3 times out of 4 of the time, or 9 out of 10 times. Imagine an archery contest.

I need to know if a damn task is easy to do or not. Especially as a player, so I know if I am playing it safe, or doing a reckless thing.

I can't roleplay if I have no idea how good my character is at various tasks, it's like playing an amnesiac - "I have no ideahow hard it is, let's see if I can climb a tree!" "I have no experience with this at all, so let's see if I can swim though this pond!"

Actually, the beauty of this dice mechanic is that you can translate results of a roll into lots of things. For instance, you have the variables of number of different matches, how many dice in a match and even what number the match has. And you can translate those into lots of things, while keeping the core mechanism of "roll dice, try to get matching numbers" simple and clean. At the same time, you get the advantages of keeping all the variables visible on the table (unlike say D20 where you need to add and subtract modifiers to your roll) and you can also minimize the amounts of dice rolls since you can use the amount of variables present to represent different aspects of the result.

For instance, your attack roll includes where you hit someone and how hard you hit them. Instead of three different dice rolls you get away with just one.

And the elegance of that far outweights the minor deal of having exact probabilities hard to calculate on the fly.

Minor deal? What good is it to know after one roll that I hit him in the head for X dmg if I have no idea if that's a fluke, or an average result? Without probabilities you have no idea if your combat system is rocket launcher tag, meaning who goes first wins since 90% of all attacks hit for deadly damage, or padded sumo, meaning 90% of all blows miss and the 10% that connect hit the enemy for minor damage.

[Username17]

The ORE is in no way elegant. You roll the dice, and then you spend more actual time divining shit like spreads than if you had just rolled an attack die and a damage die. And the fact that neither you nor Greg Stolze can tell you what your fucking odds of getting any particular results are means that if the results of actual die rolling in actual games are anything close to acceptable it will be by complete fucking accident.

Elegance in a game mechanic means that the system does what it is supposed to do with a minimum of bullshit. You don't have clue one as to whether your system does what it is supposed to do because you don't know what the outputs even are. So it can't be elegant.

-Username17

[Kemper Boyd]

The ORE is in no way elegant. You roll the dice, and then you spend more actual time divining shit like spreads than if you had just rolled an attack die and a damage die. And the fact that neither you nor Greg Stolze can tell you what your fucking odds of getting any particular results are means that if the results of actual die rolling in actual games are anything close to acceptable it will be by complete fucking accident.

Elegance in a game mechanic means that the system does what it is supposed to do with a minimum of bullshit. You don't have clue one as to whether your system does what it is supposed to do because you don't know what the outputs even are. So it can't be elegant.

-Username17

Gotta ask, have you actually ever tried playing with a dice-matching system like ORE? Because the concerns people have fielded in this thread haven't surfaced in actual play.

Which is why I rather emphasize playtesting with a proper process than just doing mechanics theory on paper. Some processes work on a simulation fairly well but don't really work in play, some rulesets play better than they look.

[Username17]

Gotta ask, have you actually ever tried playing with a dice-matching system like ORE? Because the concerns people have fielded in this thread haven't surfaced in actual play.

You're an idiot. First of all, yes I've played matching systems. Hell, even non-gamers have at some point probably played Yahtzee. It's a stupid question, because almost everyone has played matching systems, whether in an RPG context or not.

As it happens, yes I've even fucked around with matching systems in an RPG context. It is demonstrably and demonstratedly slower than other dicepool systems, and what you get for that is an incredibly short and steep chance curve bordered on either side by somewhat longer tails near 0% and 100%. It's like a regular curved roll but slower and shittier.

Secondly, how the fuck would you even know if the problem that "you have no fucking idea whether the rules are providing reasonable modifiers or difficulties or not and you're writing the fucking game" has come up in actual play? You don't know what the modifiers do. You don't know what the relative difficulties of any task are. If players succeed at a task in playtest, you don't know if you just saw a black swan event or a near guaranteed occurrence.

The primary issue is that you've already admitted that you are completely unqualified to tell people if the modifier for a circumstance should be +1 die or +2 dice or if setting a particular difficulty is reasonable or not in any particular situation. So any game you write will by definition be made not by people who are in any way qualified to do so, but by the Hamlet Typing Monkeys, of which you are a proud card-carrying member.

-Username17

[Kemper Boyd]

Secondly, how the fuck would you even know if the problem that "you have no fucking idea whether the rules are providing reasonable modifiers or difficulties or not and you're writing the fucking game" has come up in actual play? You don't know what the modifiers do. You don't know what the relative difficulties of any task are. If players succeed at a task in playtest, you don't know if you just saw a black swan event or a near guaranteed occurrence.

Having a good playtesting process helps here a lot!

I don't know how you playtest your own stuff, but as for me, I use a process similar to the one outlined in the blog post I linked a while back. The main problem that many games that end up being actually published have is that they don't use an actual process, instead people just play the game the usual way, which isn't conductive to discovering and documenting bugs or flaws or imbalances in the system.

Using an actual process, the way you'd do with a computer game, gives you insight into the things that work or don't work, and it's very robust when it comes to discovering flaws in the ruleset. If a task pegged as easy doesn't see the player succeeding, something is off and needs fixing. You change things around, re-test and try to find something that works.

At this point, I've found no major issues yet, but I'm expanding testing next month to see how more advanced rules interact with the basic system. I do believe in a professional attitude toward testing, after all.

[Fuchs]

Kemper, you can and should use math to determine what the odds are of succeeding at a task. You don't need to actually roll it out to find out if a basic task is actually easy.

Are you really telling us that you have no idea what the odds are of climbing a tree compared to scaling a cliff in your system?

[Kemper Boyd]

Kemper, you can and should use math to determine what the odds are of succeeding at a task. You don't need to actually roll it out to find out if a basic task is actually easy.

Are you really telling us that you have no idea what the odds are of climbing a tree compared to scaling a cliff in your system?

Well, say that the tree example is one where you have no actual time constraints, you're dressed properly and the weather is fair, you just roll skill and attribute put together, Say you got a pool of six and two of a kind is enough for any default action, so your chance of success is roughly 85%, give or take.

With the cliff example, it would work the same way, but let's say that the GM says it's a climb that requires equipment.

Now, if there's no equipment to be used, the GM might say that climbing it has a penalty of 1d10, so you'd roll just 5d. That would lower your success rate to around 70%.

Then there's tricks that the GM can do to make stuff harder beyond assigning penalties. Penalties in general are rather harsh on the players, so they shouldn't be used to indicate just difficulty. Instead it might be better to assign a minimum target number for success, so your matching dice need to be equal or greater than that number.

GM says that the cliff has got a bit of an overhang, so the target number is three. Now you got all that fun climbing equipment, so you avoid that nasty penalty this time, your chance of a success is a bit lower than in the first example, but not by much, can't really bother to work out the actual percentage difference.

[Fuchs]

GM says that the cliff has got a bit of an overhang, so the target number is three. Now you got all that fun climbing equipment, so you avoid that nasty penalty this time, your chance of a success is a bit lower than in the first example, but not by much, can't really bother to work out the actual percentage difference.

And that is the problem. Why do you think the chance of success is "a bit lower" if you don't know the actual percentage difference?

Do you really plan to roll such scenes 1000 times each, to work out if it's easy?

[Username17]

So... no. You don't have a single fucking idea. You just looked at the simple test probabilities we posted to demonstrate that your math was wrong to get the dice totals and then had absolutely no numbers at all for the minimum target number crap because we haven't posted it yet.

That's pathetic. You just did a whole post about different ways that the MC could assign difficulty to a test, and you have no fucking clue what they actually do.

-Username17