Minion mash

Well it seems yesterdays listing of things to work out didn't come to pass today at least, spent about five hours wandering around town. Took care of some things though none of ti really panned out but was a lot of walking. So instead of progress I'll talk about some game running problems. The problem being, lots and lots of monsters.

Lots of games have you fighting hordes of monsters. RPGs are notorious for things you dispatch in one round and just keep appearing through the game due to random encounters. FPS and action games love hordes as it can present a legitimate challenge in a game where you are overpowered to everything and your downfall can come from overconfidence or other things. RTS use this with some factions as their main method of winning as they can overwhelm you with inferior troops. Usually this is fun, in table top games it's a little differnt.

Running games usually means all the little boring things such as tallying up dice is done by humans and not in microseconds by the machine, it also has some verbal asking of players to do things, and them joking around and other things. This means what in any other game of it's genera that would take maybe five to ten minutes takes roughly a half hour of real time. Online this is even worse, I believe this was mentioned it sometime ago but my tired legs and sore feet are preventing me from moving my mouse around to dig that up, how I'm not sure. Seeing a three round combat session take forty minutes  is not uncommon for me between 5 people. I suspect youtube, image galleries, and the lower typing speed of some players has something to do from it as seeing the same text for two minutes gets them to think "well I'll just look here and check back occasionally". While a player I don't usually mind but as a DM I feel like I'm failing in keeping them interested especially when this is just a minor inconvenience fight that could go bad if mistakes are made.

This often makes me question the making of such things. Usually I go with it though with less monsters than I'd see fitting as this keeps the hack and slash slough from continuing too long. Another thing is not only do my players have to roll, I have to roll for the monsters while the players have to do checks. Having 6 monsters who make attacks and target different players who may cause rolls from them and so on is a bit of a headache and extends the length of battle quite significantly.

Mutants and Masterminds system does have a solution to minion swarms that are still threats but aren't quite grinds. It's damage system is based on a saving roll and failing that by enough can incapacitate a player, foes generally run on the same rule. While it seems horribly swinging it's mitigated by hero points and the fact that you can't be taken out in one hit. Minions work slightly different, they make their saves so they can get by unscathed but on any failure they take the worst condition. Beyond that they can dish out damage like any other character allowing them to be a real threat without the unfairness of them facing double their numbers that are roughly as hard hitting as them.

The rolling for the mobs attack I've written a page from my book on. I've come up with two solutions that I employ regularly. One I have "auto pass assistance" for the mobs, each one in range adds +1 to the attack roll of one monster. Assistance is an action that tests a monsters attack against DC 10 so it passes 55% of the time with no attack bonus, most have attack bonus so quickly this is just auto passed. Using the idea allows for a better chance to hit with less rolling, though it's safer for players as they have less chances to just flat out fail a save roll. For minor encounters it works for me. The other one is to use the books combined attack with monsters. For each one that "hits" the target there is an increase in the difficulty of the save that must be passed. It reduces rolls for players while allowing me to at least pretend each monster maters more, and does increase the threat level substantually from a group based beat down. The problem is that it starts to enter one shot territory. By rules and probability if they were equal level threats 6 monsters attacking would cause there to always be some sort of wound and about a 50% chance (with large room for error due to me not actually taking out scratch paper for this) of defeat if they all succeed on hiting. Players could hero point to avoid this but that seems slightly too punishing if it's just a bump in the road to your main encounter.

It's a thing I struggle with in designing encounters. Thematically it is great but in practice it could just be seen as filler or a time sink. At least with the last batch I've been making the taking out of the mass of zombies be laughably gory which has something for it.

Probability 101

Something with a little meat on it today. I was going to revisit a bit talked about here with the two weapon/multi attack problem. The problem is there is a lot of points and areas that one could excel at over the other in some thinking on the problem. Too much for that today so I'll go over a bit of probability as a primer to that.

First bit about probability. Probability in the mathmatic terms refers to, the instances in which an event happens out of all possible events. The "all possible events" is commonly called the sample space, it's not so much all possible events as so much as the ones you can get to with your experiement. So from this figuring a simple one is rolling a 1 on a six sided die. There is only one instance of 1 out of a total sample space of 6, so the result for rolling a 1 is  1/6. It doesn't even have to be a singular number, it can be something more complex like rolling higher than a 4 on a six sided dice. The number of instances this happens is two, them being 5 and 6, causing the probability of rolling above a 4 to be 2/6 or 1/3 through reduction. Simple until you start looking into multi variable problems but I won't beat your head over those too much.

Another thing that I should prime on is the "average" number or mean which is the "center" of most bell curves(a term that isn't exactly needed for this right now). For all purposes at the moment this will mathematically work for us, it's determined by adding the highest and lowest number together and dividing by two producing the theoretical mean, it's useful for guessing where most of the dice will be rolling.  There is another form of averaging which is also called a mean it is taken through gathering data points, you take every item add them all together and then divide by how many items there were. This is how they get average life expectancy, age, and other thigns. It's not perfect but it's one of the useable estimations, there are others out there.

Such as mode. Mode is the instance in the sample space that is the most likely to occur.  Five people aged 20 , three 23 year olds, and one creepy 50 year old show up to an event. The mean of this is 24 and the theoretical mean is 35, the mean derived by the actual numbers is clearly better here but still not exactly close enough. The single 50 year old is generally known as an outlier in these, or an odd event that generally doesn't happen but is taken into account because it did. Because of this the mean has shifted far further than it should have. So by looking at the mode we'll see that there were five 20 year olds which is more than the three 23 year old and the one 50 year old. You now have what is your most likely event if that was what you were actually looking for. It's useful for what is called unequal distributions. Where the most likely instances of occurrence are not actually clustered. I'll make a poorly labeled graph to try and get the point across. The green curve if I could actually draw this right under some average measurements would appear to have a "peak" in the middle like the red curve when it plainly isn't true. Mode can shed some light on just how much it is skewed if you look at it with the average next to it.

The last bit of probability I want to talk about is the median. The median is not something I use that often but probably should. Effectively you take all data or sample space and sort it then find the exact middle based on number of items and say that's the middle. Half of everything you can see falls above this point, and half of everything falls bellow it. It's like the illegitimate offspring of the mean and mode but I prefer some actual number useage when it comes to my disecting of these problems.

Well hopefully this wasn't too horribly long, incomprehensible, or boring but in the future this may save me some trouble. It's funny as people find probability to be some mystic strange thing when compared to other math. While I just find it to be the only one I can come to understand. Might as well finish this with a question for you guys as it's becoming a trend. What things that seem hard to other people seem to naturally click with you?

Hit points, Attack, and damage. The components of the padded sumo slap fight.

This comes up a lot more in Table top games than video games. A point where the fight is already decided or no one knows who is winning until 5 more attacks hit. For a while in 4th edition D&D the term Padded sumo fight came up when people realized that the monsters high hit points and other defenses while not being a high enough threat to the players perceptions. It's popped up in other systems; as stated 4th edition had a problem with the monsters just having too much HP to deal with in a 'fun' time frame, Dark Heresy for being a very lethal system has laughably easy ways to survive damage considering it's low to hit aspects, and Mutants and Masterminds has this effect alot where fights run a lot longer when it could be the players effectivly just finishing off the boss I set up while the only threat at this point comes from them rolling too low when taking damage. It's just not satisfying at those points and becomes a chore.

Pen and Paper combat takes a decently long time, online it takes a lot longer for magical reasons. When combat becomes a chore instead of an exciting situation people quit describing attacks and just rolling their most effective attacking against the most threatening target or weakest target, it honestly doesn't matter to the players at this point. They just want the fight over with and while the GM may have some surprises left they quit caring too and just want to get back to the "fun". Which is a big problem, as the entire gaming experience should be fun to some degree.

There a few factors in what causes a fight to be a boring grind, and like my title suggests  it's all about the abstracts used in games. The majority of games like the hit point concept, have 1 and your fine. They also like a simple way to reduce them, straight up damage rolls. Simple enough you can get how long you're expected, in a boring fashion, to take down a monster. Hitpoints/average_damage gives you how many turns it's likely to take down that monster in the bread and butter fashion. Though most games have an attack roll to hit the monster, making the formula a bit longer Hitpoints/(chance_to_hit*average_damage) making combat longer. In D&D and it's general rule of thumb 50% chance to hit a target of the same level you're effectively doubling the length of fights. Some system also let the defending player negate attacks leading to something akin to Hitpoints/((chance_to_hit*chance_to_negate*average_damage). Give a player a 50% chance to hit and the defender a 50% chance to ignore that hit and you've effectively quadrupled the length of the fight. At these stages you could reduce the hit points of the target to taste and arrive at something that would take an estimate few rounds. This presents a problem as the formula takes into account the player missing and the negation chance happening according to average static terms. Dice don't have memory and typically like to ignore averages in the short term scale, long term 10000+ rolls not so much. Generally called "swingyness" where a few rolls control the fate of a character you can end up with the monster in one hit your designed challenging monster can happen enough that you'll question dice randomness. On the other side the one hit mooks you send out could prove more effective than any boss encounter you carefully prepared.

How to solve this problem seem to be a dilemma in gaming at large and various solutions have come up for it. Action point systems let you reroll dice is a common one. Some others give you insurance that if you get taken out in one shot letting you ignore it that time. Either way a lot of systems require a lot of taste in how combat  works to enjoy it. I prefer mine a little more swingy. I'd rather have a battle short and over and deal with the consequences than to have the battle take too long.