[OSSR]Unknown Armies

[Sakuya Izayoi]

% roll under systems are the worst thing to judge from actual play, as someone whose introduction to the hobby was Warhammer RPGs. MTP is a necessity of the mechanics. How else would someone with a 33 in their primary career skill work for 40 years without killing themselves hilariously, unless God decided to be generous on the free passes most days?

[GâtFromKI]

Like, what's with the hostility?

On a fundamental level, a review is a subjective thing. And reviewing a game without actually playing it is on the same level as reviewing a restaurant by reading the menu. Amusing, perhaps, but lacks a fundamental element of substance.

That isn't a very relevant comparison.

Reviewing a game run by you or your friend by reading the rulebook is like reviewing a restaurant by reading the menu.

But reviewing a rulebook without playing it is like reviewing a recipe without preparing it: you can totally say that the recipe of shit cake isn't a good recipe without preparing it, even though a good chef can make it good by replacing shit with chocolate.

[silva]

Sakuya, RQ is also % roll under and its perfectly possible to begin te game as a young adult with a primary career skill in the 60s or 70s. And if you begin as someone with 40 years of experience, it can easily go to the 90s.

So perhaps the problem you indicate is a feat of Warhammer, and not all % systems in general.

[Kemper Boyd]

There's also the assumption in UA that since you only roll when you're actually challenged, you go day to day without making a single roll. A TV repairman knows how to open up a TV and check if a doohickey is busted and knows how to replace, I know how to do a background check of someone. These aren't common skills though, but it's not like you're challenged to the limit every day by your job.

[Ancient History]

Ye gods and hairy fishes, this is like Zak S again.

[Kemper Boyd]

Ye gods and hairy fishes, this is like Zak S again.

I don't harass people online though.

[GâtFromKI]

There's also the assumption in UA that since you only roll when you're actually challenged, you go day to day without making a single roll. A TV repairman knows how to open up a TV and check if a doohickey is busted and knows how to replace, I know how to do a background check of someone. These aren't common skills though, but it's not like you're challenged to the limit every day by your job.

Does a deadline count as a "meaningful time limit"?

Sakuya, RQ is also % roll under and its perfectly possible to begin te game as a young adult with a primary career skill in the 60s or 70s. And if you begin as someone with 40 years of experience, it can easily go to the 90s.

90% isn't very good anyway, except if you distribute bonus like candy. 90% on standard task is the skill level of a good student/apprentice ("you solve most of the exercises"), not of a professional with 40 year of experience.

[Kemper Boyd]

Does a deadline count as a "meaningful time limit"?

That's where the Fuzzy Logic parts come in, if it's ain't a big deal to fail at a routine task, no roll necessary.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

There's also the assumption in UA that since you only roll when you're actually challenged, you go day to day without making a single roll. A TV repairman knows how to open up a TV and check if a doohickey is busted and knows how to replace, I know how to do a background check of someone. These aren't common skills though, but it's not like you're challenged to the limit every day by your job.

"Assumptions" are entirely toothless for invoking during play. If the only thing that could save New York City is Larry the TV Repairman, suddenly Larry is relying on a coinflip to do his damn job without transforming into an incompetent boob, because suddenly there's "stakes".

[momothefiddler]

I dunno. I think if you have both the recipes and the menu it ends up approaching a reasonable simile. I mean, you have to assume the chef follows the recipe, and you'll have defenders going "No! This restaurant isn't shit! Yeah, I know the recipe for the pineapple pizza has only one ingredient and that ingredient is horseshit, but our chef doesn't make it that way so we don't have any problems."

So it matches up pretty well.

I guess you've never ordered a tuna steak in a restaurant.

I don't think I have, no. I don't go to many restaurants.

Is your argument that tuna (plot) is of varying quality beyond what the recipe (rules) considers, and you need good tuna (good plot) in addition to a good recipe (good rules) to make a good tuna steak (good game)?
Okay, that was kinda stretched.

Is it that the specifics of cooking (rule toggles) depends on how the customer wants it (table choices), and in order to satisfy your customer (players) you have to cook it to the done-ness they ordered (use the chosen rule toggles)?

Please explain because - and maybe this is because I haven't ordered a tuna steak at a restaurant - I have no clue what you're trying to say there.

[Kemper Boyd]

Please explain because - and maybe this is because I haven't ordered a tuna steak at a restaurant - I have no clue what you're trying to say there.

Well, how the tuna turns out is most of all reliant of the skill of the chef. A chef could follow a recipe and still the tuna would turn out tasting like sawdust. I guess that in this case, the chef's the GM.

What is actually a problem with Unknown Armies is that there's a lot of stuff that should be made more clear as to how to run it. Being an antagonistic GM just doesn't work at all, because of the assumptions to how characters work (skills, passions, and all that), an antagonistic GM can easily ruin the game. The old Gygaxian GM isn't really suited for running a game of UA, and the book should be more forward about that.

[fbmf]

I dunno. I think if you have both the recipes and the menu it ends up approaching a reasonable simile. I mean, you have to assume the chef follows the recipe, and you'll have defenders going "No! This restaurant isn't shit! Yeah, I know the recipe for the pineapple pizza has only one ingredient and that ingredient is horseshit, but our chef doesn't make it that way so we don't have any problems."

So it matches up pretty well.

I guess you've never ordered a tuna steak in a restaurant.

I don't think I have, no. I don't go to many restaurants.

Is your argument that tuna (plot) is of varying quality beyond what the recipe (rules) considers, and you need good tuna (good plot) in addition to a good recipe (good rules) to make a good tuna steak (good game)?
Okay, that was kinda stretched.

Is it that the specifics of cooking (rule toggles) depends on how the customer wants it (table choices), and in order to satisfy your customer (players) you have to cook it to the done-ness they ordered (use the chosen rule toggles)?

Please explain because - and maybe this is because I haven't ordered a tuna steak at a restaurant - I have no clue what you're trying to say there.

I have, and I've worked in restaurants that served tuna steak(full disclosure: wasn't a chef/cook) and I don't follow the analogy either.

Game On,
fbmf

[Kemper Boyd]

"Assumptions" are entirely toothless for invoking during play. If the only thing that could save New York City is Larry the TV Repairman, suddenly Larry is relying on a coinflip to do his damn job without transforming into an incompetent boob, because suddenly there's "stakes".

Most people do perform like shit under pressure. UA also isn't really about the sorts of characters you'd see in something like Shadowrun or say, WoD games. Street-level characters are designed to be sort of bad at things that aren't central to their core concepts.

It's actually closer to OD&D, where every thief starts out as being utter crap at their job.

[silva]

90% isn't very good anyway, except if you distribute bonus like candy. 90% on standard task is the skill level of a good student/apprentice ("you solve most of the exercises"), not of a professional with 40 year of experience.

A standard task in a calm context should not demand any roll for neither the professional nor the apprentice. Whats your point ?

[erik]

Most people do perform like shit under pressure.

Inconsistent with ...

UA also isn't really about the sorts of characters you'd see in something like Shadowrun or say, WoD games. Street-level characters are designed to be sort of bad at things that aren't central to their core concepts.

It's actually closer to OD&D, where every thief starts out as being utter crap at their job.

Which is it? People are all crap at their jobs when it matters and UA is a faithful representation of this reality... or people can be competent at their jobs but UA characters are not supposed to be competent?

Either way, god help anyone who needs surgery.

[talozin]

I've found that the system does a good job of fleshing out characters and the concept of having a skill penumbra is great. For instance, if you have a Guns skill, it might include things like general knowledge about guns, gun laws, how to get a gun and so on. Kind of like how Backgrounds work in 13th Age.

The idea of a skill penumbra is indeed kind of neat. It was neat in Feng Shui, where having a high Guns skill specifically means that you know all those things and then some, and where having a high Martial Arts skill means you know about famous kung fu masters and styles and that kind of thing. Feng Shui has a more or less fixed skill list, though, and I'm not sure how having a freeform skill list interacts with that kind of thing. The skill "Toaster Repair" costs the same as the skill "I am Batman" even though the latter player could completely argue that being a technological genius capable of inventing, repairing, and gimmicking gadgets of all kinds means that Bruce Wayne should totally be able able to fix a toaster. And hide a Batarang inside while he's at it.

You might say that Batman's player is a total munchkin for having that skill, and maybe he is. That's kind of the issue with freeform skills, though: how do we get everyone on the same page? There's an actual official Unknown Armies NPC who has a skill in "Killing Things Up Close". Is that supposed to be the default level of specific? And how are we supposed to get everybody to agree on what else is roughly as specific as that? Is Mister Cavern supposed to just expand any skill a player buys to the widest possible interpretation, so "Toaster Repair" becomes Anything-Goes-Martial-Toaster-Repair and the guy can use the skill in combat by stabbing people with a screwdriver or electrocuting them with a frayed toaster cord? That's kind of cool if so, but at that point what motivates a player to buy more than one skill defined as broadly as his imagination allows?

The point is not that there are no answers to these questions. (As I said earlier in the thread, one possible answer is "Mister Cavern writes up your characters and tries to balance them as equally as possible given his own knowledge of the adventure." And that works out pretty well if you don't mind giving up a certain amount of player agency.) The issue people are having with Unknown Armies is that it raises these questions and then kind of shrugs and mutters, "Whatever, man," and goes off to smoke a cigarette outside the bar. Sure, a good GM can make the game work, and a good GM and good players who know each other well won't run into serious problems. That, however, is not an endorsement of Unknown Armies, it's just an endorsement of having a good GM and players.

[momothefiddler]

Please explain because - and maybe this is because I haven't ordered a tuna steak at a restaurant - I have no clue what you're trying to say there.

Well, how the tuna turns out is most of all reliant of the skill of the chef. A chef could follow a recipe and still the tuna would turn out tasting like sawdust. I guess that in this case, the chef's the GM.

So your argument is that recipes/rules are irrelevant because a good chef/MC can make something palatable out of a shit recipe/system and an awful chef/MC can make a disaster out of even a good recipe/system?

[Kemper Boyd]

You might say that Batman's player is a total munchkin for having that skill, and maybe he is. That's kind of the issue with freeform skills, though: how do we get everyone on the same page? There's an actual official Unknown Armies NPC who has a skill in "Killing Things Up Close". Is that supposed to be the default level of specific? And how are we supposed to get everybody to agree on what else is roughly as specific as that? Is Mister Cavern supposed to just expand any skill a player buys to the widest possible interpretation, so "Toaster Repair" becomes Anything-Goes-Martial-Toaster-Repair and the guy can use the skill in combat by stabbing people with a screwdriver or electrocuting them with a frayed toaster cord? That's kind of cool if so, but at that point what motivates a player to buy more than one skill defined as broadly as his imagination allows?

The point is not that there are no answers to these questions. (As I said earlier in the thread, one possible answer is "Mister Cavern writes up your characters and tries to balance them as equally as possible given his own knowledge of the adventure." And that works out pretty well if you don't mind giving up a certain amount of player agency.) The issue people are having with Unknown Armies is that it raises these questions and then kind of shrugs and mutters, "Whatever, man," and goes off to smoke a cigarette outside the bar. Sure, a good GM can make the game work, and a good GM and good players who know each other well won't run into serious problems. That, however, is not an endorsement of Unknown Armies, it's just an endorsement of having a good GM and players.

This is true. Considering Greg Stolze probably got the idea from Over The Edge (since he played the horrible munchkin character described in the OTE 2nd ed rulebook) about the freeform skills, there should have been more guidelines to how to use them successfully. Some of the people I've played with have played UA for more than 10 years and this stuff comes easy to them.

I hope that the upcoming new edition of UA actually gives more guidelines to how things should work. I feel that there can't be hard rules about this sort of thing, but a guideline that gets everyone on the same page should be doable.

[Kemper Boyd]

So your argument is that recipes/rules are irrelevant because a good chef/MC can make something palatable out of a shit recipe/system and an awful chef/MC can make a disaster out of even a good recipe/system?

The recipes matter, but the skill of the chef is always the central issue.

I'd see it more like this anyway: mediocre and good rules, the GM has less work to do running an enjoyable game. Bad rules, the GM needs to do a lot of more work and even then, the game might be unenjoyable. I remember a campaign of Orpheus that fell flat because the GM got too frustrated with the ruleset. And he wasn't half bad at running the game.

And yes, UA should have a more sturdy set of advice on how to run it. Some games, like Dungeon World and Burning Wheel, come with far better advice on how the GM should do their work.

[momothefiddler]

So your argument is that recipes/rules are irrelevant because a good chef/MC can make something palatable out of a shit recipe/system and an awful chef/MC can make a disaster out of even a good recipe/system?

The recipes matter, but the skill of the chef is always the central issue.

I'd see it more like this anyway: mediocre and good rules, the GM has less work to do running an enjoyable game. Bad rules, the GM needs to do a lot of more work and even then, the game might be unenjoyable. I remember a campaign of Orpheus that fell flat because the GM got too frustrated with the ruleset. And he wasn't half bad at running the game.

And yes, UA should have a more sturdy set of advice on how to run it. Some games, like Dungeon World and Burning Wheel, come with far better advice on how the GM should do their work.

So you agree that there is a separation between the skill of the MC and the usefulness of the rules, and that rules can be good or bad - something that then is combined with the skill of the MC to provide a final result. Remember, the start of this line of thought was:

On a fundamental level, a review is a subjective thing. And reviewing a game without actually playing it is on the same level as reviewing a restaurant by reading the menu. Amusing, perhaps, but lacks a fundamental element of substance.

There are two important factors here:

1. The skill of the MC varies based on table. That's out of the hands of the reviewer, of the writer, of anyone but the people playing that specific instance of the game. So when we say some rules are better than others, we're saying that, keeping the MC skill constant, one set will provide better overall results than another. That is, we're judging the rules separately from their MC adjustment. There's no reason to bring MC skill into it, even supposing a skill high enough to change the recipe enough to get a good dish because:

2. To paraphrase Frank: We assume use of the recipe as written because that's the recipe that was sold. Maybe your chef can fudge the recipe to get something good out of it. Maybe your chef can ignore the bad parts and just make good food off the top of his head. But if that's the case, why are you paying money for a recipe you won't use? If you're only using half the ingredients and none of the instructions to get your good dish, doesn't that make the price of the recipe a bit steep? If you're only using the name and making things up based on that, why buy anything at all? There's nothing wrong with a chef making things up, but there's no point in buying and learning a recipe if you're just gonna go right back to making things up.



(Also please fix your quote tags)

[silva]

Momo, its not just a matter of how the chef will cook the recipe. Its also a matter of the customer knowing how the different igredients interact together to produce an ending result/taste/experience. And this will depend on a number of factors, from the customer personal experience, to the customer capacity to project the intended final taste.

If one take Frank impressions on Apocalypse World (again, projecting "problems" that never hapenned at anyone tables), its easy to see how a reviewer can fail in projecting the intended taste/experience, specially without any actual-play experience.

[Username17]

silva brings apocalypse fucking world into this thread too? OK fuck that. He goes on ignore now and doesn't come off. Fucking adbots are not worth my time.

-Username17

[Longes]

Kemper, close your goddamn quote tags! Please!

[silva]

Nope, I bring evidence that your reviewing prowess is far from perfect.

[momothefiddler]

If one take Frank impressions on Apocalypse World (again, projecting "problems" that never hapenned at anyone tables), its easy to see how a reviewer can fail in projecting the intended taste/experience, specially without any actual-play experience.

Good point. If a pineapple pizza recipe had only one ingredient and that ingredient was horseshit, it's easy to see how the experience as projected by someone who read the recipe wouldn't match up with the experience of someone who actually ate it, since even a mediocre chef would just make a pizza with pineapple instead of following the recipe.

Of course, all that means is that the recipe's useless. You see, Frank never said people were eating horseshit pizzas all over the place. He just said that chefs were making pizzas with pineapple despite the horseshit recipe.

Edit: and, of course, that the horseshit recipe was, well, shit.