Analysis of Troubled Design: After Sundown

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Post by Username17 »

Zaranthan wrote:I think Shadowrun 4 actually got something right here: the minimum stat was 1 and the "human average" stat was 2, while stats above 7 were basically Lala Land.
While I agree that putting "average" nearer to the player minimum than to the player maximum is a great idea, I disagree that putting the minimum at 1 was a good idea. Dicepool systems break down at very low dicepool sizes, and starting with 1 die is literally the actual minimum and wears all the wackiness of the mechanic at low numbers on its sleeve. I think it would be a lot better if the minimum was 3 or 4. But of course, the number on an average bystander would still be just one higher than that, while near super human levels would come in at +6.
Whipstitch wrote:Yeah, that trend was pretty easy to spot as a Shadowrun fanboy given the whole business of splitting Intelligence and Quickness into Logic/Intuition and Reaction/Agility. Now obviously the primary justification was due to game balance reasons, but the sort of discussions you're talking about were always part of the background noise.
It was mechanically necessary to get the stat that handled all clue finding, ambush spotting, detective work, and computer repair into pieces. For fuck's sake, it was a Cyberpunk game, that list is almost everything you do! But I think that mechanical need is filled by splitting it into Intelligence and Perception.
Orion wrote:It's pretty clear to me that in After Sundown, if you rename Intuition it should be called "Instinct."
That is an absolutely terrible idea. In a game where you have Master Passions, your "Instinct" would be to fly into a rage or lose yourself in despair or something. If you go to the Dictionary, the definition you are looking for ("natural intuitive power") is definition number four. The first definition is "an inborn pattern of activity" and the second definition is "an innate impulse or tendency." In a Vampire heartbreaker, people would simply expect your "Instinct" level to be the difficulty of resisting frenzy, because that is obviously what it means. It is an obviously inappropriate name for a stat that you want to be high in perceptive individuals.

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Post by OgreBattle »

If you want to give joe sixpack a fighting chance against a cat, the average stats for a human need to be higher than the minimum stats the game can handle.

I think of rigging as also encompassing the ninja tool stuff like blinding powder, caltrops, needles, grappling hooks, ensaring folks with ropes, so it comes off as one of the cooler skills to have and ninjutsu magic can work off of it.
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Post by erik »

To help with dice pools and skills, I offer the mechanics I used for Nexus- skill training doesn't boost your pool but instead it changes the success number from 5 to 4. And to allow you to convert 3 dice to 1 success outside of combat type situations. This has the effect of reducing number of dice needed and makes a pool of 2 a good average for normals since with training they now can perform their routine job tasks as expected if they're paying attention (since one of the default movement options is Focus, which gives +1 die to skill).
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Variable target numbers are a rabbit hole you don't wanna go down. Makes it way harder to intuit the worth of two different piles of dice. Having that be only two states (5+ or 4+) is only less bad to the extent that it resembles having that be only one state (5+)
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Feb 05, 2017 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

erik wrote:To help with dice pools and skills, I offer the mechanics I used for Nexus- skill training doesn't boost your pool but instead it changes the success number from 5 to 4. And to allow you to convert 3 dice to 1 success outside of combat type situations. This has the effect of reducing number of dice needed and makes a pool of 2 a good average for normals since with training they now can perform their routine job tasks as expected if they're paying attention (since one of the default movement options is Focus, which gives +1 die to skill).
I definitely wouldn't do that. For like, a board game or something where the number of dice that are being rolled are really tied down to distinct and specific numbers, varying TNs can work fine. But for an RPG where the dicepool sizes are varying all over the place and representing house cats and dragon gods and everything in between, variable target numbers just aren't good. There is a reason that Shadowrun and even fucking White Wolf abandoned variable target numbers. And the reason is that target number variance acts as a multiplier on dice pool modifiers which cause your bonuses and penalties to both dicepools and target numbers to have inconsistent values. This makes calculating probabilities super hard to the point where the actual game designers just can't do it.

But like, in Arkham Horror or something, the fact that Bless is hilariously better than a dicepool bonus once dicepools get over 6 is fine. It's a board game, and no one really cares if you break it.

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Post by kzt »

Occluded Sun wrote: I don't think there are many world-class swimmers who could also be world-class linebackers, for instance. And I would be surprised if there are many former Olympic athletes who, after their careers, go on to do well even in sports that are relatively tolerant of age (like, say, golf). The skills of a gymnast don't translate to hitting balls long distances with great accuracy, or putting well. I'm pretty sure no Olympic weightlifter ever goes on to do anything athletic, period - extreme specialization and associated physical damage takes it toll.
I know a girl who is the US Weighlifting national champion in the 63kg class. She is a completely amazing athlete. She also got into the Crossfit games (as in one of the finalists) before developing heatstroke on TV. She was also a competitive gymnast and rock climber during her early teens.

People who are at that level are all insanely athletically gifted. And very willing to train hard. Anything athletic they care about they get really good at fast. They might not become world class in a new sport, but vs a normal person who has been a solid competitor training hard at this sport for years? The Olympic level athlete will blow their doors off in a few weeks to months.

The top athletes in any given sport are all like that. They choose to specialize, both because there is also a big skill component and only limited training time, they just don't care about some sports, and certain sports are a better fit for a particular body type and they normally are going to do something where they can excel at.
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Post by erik »

I think figuring out the probability for effective d2 and d3 pools isn't too onerous. It's a single toggle on the TN between competent and untrained, rather than a bunch of different TN which make things impossible to predict.

*shrugs*
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Post by Lokathor »

Orion wrote:It doesn't help that none of this shit is spelled out up front. Players discover the required skills for their monster class emergently as they read through their disciplines, which happens well after they've read the monster's text write-up and bought in to a character concept. Nothing actually warns people that Daevas need Tactics, Baalim need Artisan, Verbena need freaking Rigging
I want to bring emphasis back to this: if there's going to be "soft classes", then the game needs to be a whole lot more clear about that fact. Otherwise, if you do the "normal" thing and pick the skills that your character would know based on their personal history, you end up with nonsense for magic and then just resort to picking powers that don't have dice pools at all. If skill options for magic are supposed to drive skill selections, you need to spell out "you should make your character in a spreadsheet and first assign skill points so that your key powers are maxed that way."
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Post by Username17 »

Lokathor wrote:I want to bring emphasis back to this: if there's going to be "soft classes", then the game needs to be a whole lot more clear about that fact.
I absolutely agree with that. And I think I have a way to help a bit. Aside from having each discipline telling you at the top what dicepools it may call upon, I think that each skill category should have a table that says what disciplines each skill might get called upon for. So when you're looking up the Social Skills, you'd have a chart that looked something like this:
PowerBureaucracyEmpathyExpressionIntimidationPersuasionTactics
AuthorityXXXX
Celerity
Clout
DiscernmentXXX
Fortitude
MagnetismXXXXX
VeilX
Call of the WildXX
Chasing the Storm
Coil of ThornsX
Depths of DespairXX
Sands of MorpheusXX
Secrets of the EarthXX
TechnomancyXX
Descent of EntropyXX
Names of the BlasphemiesXX
Progress of GlassXX
Song of SwarmsX
Tangle of ArachneXX
Walk of FlameX
Lure of DestructionXX
Measure of FleshX
NecromancyXXX
Path of BloodX
Play of ShadowsXX
Symphony of SilenceXX

I think that would help a lot.

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Post by Zaranthan »

FrankTrollman wrote:Dicepool systems break down at very low dicepool sizes, and starting with 1 die is literally the actual minimum and wears all the wackiness of the mechanic at low numbers on its sleeve. I think it would be a lot better if the minimum was 3 or 4. But of course, the number on an average bystander would still be just one higher than that, while near super human levels would come in at +6.
The dice mechanics are a bit separate. Making your dicepool stat+skill+2 would be fine. What I was getting at was you don't need to take a hit to melting ICE or slinging spells just to avoid having the DM inform you that your character can't comprehend his bank statement or ride a bicycle. Telling people that your PCs START with "human average" stats across the board would be even better, and just set the actual number wherever you need it for the pools to work.

TLDR: The Fallout thing is fine for a video game where you're signing on for that crap. Not so much where you need to interact with other players for a few months.
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Post by shinimasu »

The chart helps with player expectation and navigating the soft classes. It doesn't really address the inherent silliness of your powerful great elder deep one NPC/Antagonist also being a stellar electrician.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Personally, I've opted to rename several of the original AS attributes, in order to make their name best reflect their usage:

Strength -> Health
Agility -> Nerve

Logic -> Logic
Intuition -> Sense

Charisma -> Charm
Will -> Will

Intelligence; due to its preponderance towards meaning any definition of cognitive ability; really means nothing. Splitting mental capabilities between the ability to absorb data; versus process data; was how I went about it.
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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:
erik wrote:To help with dice pools and skills, I offer the mechanics I used for Nexus- skill training doesn't boost your pool but instead it changes the success number from 5 to 4. And to allow you to convert 3 dice to 1 success outside of combat type situations. This has the effect of reducing number of dice needed and makes a pool of 2 a good average for normals since with training they now can perform their routine job tasks as expected if they're paying attention (since one of the default movement options is Focus, which gives +1 die to skill).
I definitely wouldn't do that. For like, a board game or something where the number of dice that are being rolled are really tied down to distinct and specific numbers, varying TNs can work fine. But for an RPG where the dicepool sizes are varying all over the place and representing house cats and dragon gods and everything in between, variable target numbers just aren't good. There is a reason that Shadowrun and even fucking White Wolf abandoned variable target numbers. And the reason is that target number variance acts as a multiplier on dice pool modifiers which cause your bonuses and penalties to both dicepools and target numbers to have inconsistent values. This makes calculating probabilities super hard to the point where the actual game designers just can't do it.

But like, in Arkham Horror or something, the fact that Bless is hilariously better than a dicepool bonus once dicepools get over 6 is fine. It's a board game, and no one really cares if you break it.

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Variable TNs and variable dice pools both have problems, and widel varying TNs are terrible for obvious reasons, especially with unlimited TN modifiers. But limited use of higher or lower TNs does have a place, I think. That place is in making very easy but not automatically tasks actually easy, and in making very hard but possible tasks actually hard but still possible, things which pure dice pool systems have trouble with.

On a D6, having a TN range of 3, 4, 5 gives you probabilities per dice of 2/3, 1/2, 1/3 for easy, normal, and hard tasks, however they're defined, is easily calculable.

Shadowrun really failed when you got into TNs of 8+ because difficulty skyrocketed at an exponential rate. And it was extremely easy to stack TN modifiers onto people. To a lesser extent, TN2 was also a problem, due to how easy it was to get. And this goes back to initiative, where whomever won it basically won the fight, either because they could kill everyone else before anyone else moved, or because they could toss out a bunch of TN modifiers and make it impossible for anyone else to succeed at anything.
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Post by Username17 »

shinimasu wrote:The chart helps with player expectation and navigating the soft classes. It doesn't really address the inherent silliness of your powerful great elder deep one NPC/Antagonist also being a stellar electrician.
Image

Image
Ancient vampires are randomly experts at computer hacking or rock music or something. It's a fundamental conceit of the genre. Having a mechanical incentive for that to be true is good for genre emulation.

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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:
shinimasu wrote:The chart helps with player expectation and navigating the soft classes. It doesn't really address the inherent silliness of your powerful great elder deep one NPC/Antagonist also being a stellar electrician.
Image

Image
Ancient vampires are randomly experts at computer hacking or rock music or something. It's a fundamental conceit of the genre. Having a mechanical incentive for that to be true is good for genre emulation.

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Well, if your ancient vampires are awake and actually doing stuff, it makes sense. Lastat loved music. He had centuries to practice his craft, so he'd be very good at it. Other vampires might like to keep on the cutting edge of technology. The vampire early adopter who was tinkering with this newfangled bronze stuff when no one had any clue what you could use it for would, of course, maintain that technophillia even as technology changes.
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Post by shinimasu »

Lestat being an instant rock sensation was also deeply deeply silly but I could roll with feature not a bug.
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Post by Lokathor »

That chart is still kinda complex, but it's better than nothing I suppose.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Bureaucracy, Empathy, Expression, Intimidation, Persuasion, Tactics seems like a of social skills. Has anyone had problems with differentiating some of them from each other, or finding all of them useful?

I figure some could be combined and turned into a focus you can take.
Feeling someone out- empathy
Organizing groups- tactics, bureaucracy
Make one other guy obey you- persuasion, intimidation

Expression rolls could come from any of the above.
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Post by Prak »

Lokathor wrote:That chart is still kinda complex, but it's better than nothing I suppose.
I feel like the chart could be made more readable by making it more graphic, but fuck if I know how to do that off the top of my head.
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Post by shinimasu »

OgreBattle wrote:Bureaucracy, Empathy, Expression, Intimidation, Persuasion, Tactics seems like a of social skills. Has anyone had problems with differentiating some of them from each other, or finding all of them useful?

I figure some could be combined and turned into a focus you can take.
Feeling someone out- empathy
Organizing groups- tactics, bureaucracy
Make one other guy obey you- persuasion, intimidation

Expression rolls could come from any of the above.
In the game I ran the only time someone used tactics was because there was a power that required it. And there are plenty of powers that require it, really useful ones, but no one ever used the skill as a skill. Hell the appeal to authority argument never even came up because no one had any authority to argue about.

Tactics feels like a skill for a game made to play at higher levels/potencies that doesn't really work at default potency 1. At potency 1 no one has any army they're leading or real political clout unless you dumped a shitload of points into assets and contacts at character creation. Which is a bit much to be able to use one skill the way it was written.
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Post by Whipstitch »

That doesn't really match my experiences. Tactics contributes to appeal to authority, several spells and the number of dudes allowed to contribute in a teamwork test. It's not a great skill for everyone but the coterie is better off if there's a character who can dust off their leadership skills for situations where you care about hitting high thresholds like with research tests. I also strongly disagree on the amount of clout a coterie can collectively throw around with starting resource points--the assets table seriously lists "National Guard" for 3 points, after all--but that's practically a separate argument since I think those tables are vague enough that I'd like to see Frank be more specific about how many dudes he's talking about in that section.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Lokathor wrote:That chart is still kinda complex, but it's better than nothing I suppose.
I figure that people need a lot of redundant information. So in the skill lists, there would be charts like that which show which disciplines use which skills. And in the disciplines themselves it would list out the different dicepools they could use. And at the beginning of each power there would be a nWoD style dicepool line which told you what your options were. And finally, each creature type would like a couple of archetypes that made use of the dicepools that the default power arrays benefited from.

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Post by DrPraetor »

Ooh, that's fun. Let's brainstorm some archetypes!
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Werepunk
Type: Werewolf
The werepunk was a snot-nosed kid, dumb and brave enough to go toe-to-toe with a werewolf in war form. He was probably protecting his spunky little sister, because underneath the rough exterior, werepunk has a heart of gold.
Core skills: Empathy, Intimidation, Combat, Athletics, Larceny, Sabotage.
Resources: Destiny 3 (necklace), Assets 2 (gangbangers), Contacts 1 (drug dealers), Finances 1, Duty 1 (sister)
Trappings: Hand weapon, small pistol, stupid tribal necklace that actually-is-magic, members-only jacket with a wolf on it.
Cult: Stellar Oracles
Basic powers (skill): The Beckoning (Empathy), Repel (Intimidate)
Other powers (skill): Learn the Heart's Pain (Empathy), Banishment (Larceny), Mask of a Thousand Faces (Larceny), Lost and Found (Larceny.)

The necklace warns him when supernaturals enter the material world nearby. Direction and rough distance is known. Range is 100 meters, +100 meters per point of their potency. Power source is Orphic.

Knave
Type: Nezumi
The Knave may be a rat, but he's likable; either a lovable loser, or a lucky bastard that even his enemies have a soft spot for.
Core skills: Expression, Survival, Larceny, Medicine
Resources: Contacts 3 (Akuma soul merchants), Science 3 (University Hospital), Finances 2, Secrets 1, Enemies 3 (screwed-over mobsters).
Cult: Church of Set
Basic powers (skill): Abyss of the Body (Medicine), Hide From Notice (Survival), Learn the Heart's Pain (Larceny), The Beckoning (Survival)
Other powers (skill): Suggestion (Expression), Attract (Expression), Aura of Decay (Medicine), Desire Reflection (Larceny).

[will edit more later.]

One thing I'm noticing already is that it is a bit tough to manage these dice pools for some character combinations. You get enough 6s that you don't really need to double them up, but it becomes kinda restrictive of your power progression later on.

Also, there are some skills that are both really good (Stealth) and used in a lot of magic formulae (Stealth).
Last edited by DrPraetor on Fri Feb 10, 2017 12:27 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Orion »

Frank,

Before I dive in with some more specific comments, I want to back up and ask some things about the project as a whole. Specifically, is there a way I can contribute more to this project than just posting comments on the public threads? Would you be interested in having me edit/proof/mark up your drafts for readability before you post new sections? Would you have any interest in farming out or splitting up some of the primary writing the way you used to do with K? I ask both because I want to see this project move ahead but also because I do see it as an opportunity for me to get some real experience and a publication credit. I believe -- though I could be mistaken -- that I contributed substantially more to the 1st edition than anyone else on the board (except you, obviously). I don't know much about the games publishing industry or what various credits are typically taken to mean, so I've never known how it was reasonable to describe my role in it. When I'm telling people about the game I sometimes describe myself as having "done some development work" on it or as "an editor" or "a developer" but I don't know if that's fair or accurate so I don't put it in writing anywhere. I do appreciate being on the "editing and playtesting by" list, but if I could have earned a separate by-line by taking on a little more work, (or just by asking for one) I wish I had done that. All of which is to say that I would love it if you told me how you think I could fairly describe my past work in conversation or on a resume, and whether you would be interested in offering me a titled volunteer job. Before I go back to telling you that your ideas are bad and you should feel bad, I also want to say explicitly that I can and will draw a distinction between my personal design opinions and any actual assigned work. For example, if I'm editing text or filling out power lists, I might let you know that I disagree with a design choice, but once you tell me it's locked in I will still edit or write the material.
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Post by erik »

Sometimes I think people forget there's a PM function on this board. Just sayin.
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