Been two weeks and I haven't gotten as much done as I wanted for Combat Test. Though that seems the standard when left to my own devices I get no little projects done, when I have deadlines for serious things I manage to find the time.
At the moment I have it one on one system. I have a basic set up for being able to change that in the future but at the moment testing to make things work out alright are top priority, I can add the wrinkle of three or more combatants later and pull out hair debugging it. The system was inspired quite a bit by Weapons of the Gods which I talked on in a post a while ago. Weapons of the Gods had a mechanic called the river where you could store good dice rolls and use them later or even used the ones saved to vastly improve your current dice roll. While that is interesting I'm taking a different take on it. The player chooses an action, the pool is rolled, then they move the individual dice to a "speed" pool, an "action" pool, and a "defense" pool. At the moment you can choose to put no dice in any of the pools, with the exception of defense as that at the moment takes any left over dice, but this may change in the future. From there it's success counting to see if the attack is successful against the opponent or not.
That's the basics of the system. Right now two things are being debated on adding and have had the groundwork put in for them. The first being varied defenses. Each character can change their defense set up on their turn and it'll take place when their initiative comes up. The basic is just a dodge, nothing special if your defense pool beats the active action pool for an attack you get to ignore the damage. After that is block, which lowers some of your success for your block pool, though even if the opponents attack succeeds you get a degree of damage deduction. The last defense option is parry, where if you are successful you get a counter attack. I am not quite sure on the mechanics of it as this could easily be an overpowered maneuver which may be part of the hold up on it.
The second system I've been working on and finally did enough testing to be happy with is a d20 standard. Accurate and Power attacks. You sacrifice some successes, thus missing more, to deal more damage. Or you sacrifice damage to hit more often. A bit of tweaking got it to numbers that I was pleased with and not making the normal attack worthless, though actual testing could be worthwhile.
Beyond those improvements I'm going to have to think a bit harder about things to put in. Could do some special skill or magic system but I would rather wait on that. Those just seem to be a cheap solution that isn't adding to the system right now, not saying it couldn't be added in.
Outside of the Combat Tester front I did some looking to see if I could get python to read single characters for some fancy output possibilities. I found some samples and a bit of playing with them and it works easily enough. Though it though sadly it makes it OS specific which irks me as python is a very cross system interrupter.
Showing posts with label dice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dice. Show all posts
Friday, July 8, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Probability the dice of life
Bad puns aside in table top gaming there is always a want or need for randomization and quite a few methods for randomization have been used for our polyhedron chunks of plastic. Every system has their own special name for what they're doing but more often than not you can compare it to something that's been done before. As no official name exists for any of these I'll just be pulling names out of thin air to get the point across.
The Basic Roll
Even had to pull out the bold and size change for this but I digress. The basic roll is the tried and true RPG odds generator of choice. Can function on as little as one die and is typically the same for all characters and non playing characters. The most basic idea is you roll a die or a few dice add them together, modify it with some number from somewhere, and compare them to a number to see if it's higher or lower to see if you succeed. Doesn't matter if it's a single nerdy 20 sided die or three standard 6 sided dice the basic mechanic is the same. It's good for fast rolls and for players to know the odds of success, especially if it's percentile and they're trying to roll lower than some attribute generated. I called it the basic roll as a lot of systems love this D&D, d20 systems, Basic role play, and Dark Heresy come to mind. There is one that tweaks this idea but still follows the basic mechanics and that is Legend of the 5 rings and possibly 7 seas. They use a system of Roll and Keep where you roll a number of dice like everyone else but then you pick a few from that. Typically the dice kept are the highest amount but allows an interesting function with a variable number of dice rolled. There is a lot of probability things I could get into about the difference in amount of dice rolled and the horrible results when there is a differnce between two but I think I'll save that for another day as I have a story with that.
The Dice Pool
Dice pools are different than the basic roll for a two reasons. One the amount of dice rolled can greatly vary between players. Two each die rolled in the pool is counted as it's own roll, the dice are not added up like in the basic roll. Typically when you roll a dice pool you are given a target number, this number being lower than the number of sides of the dice used. If you have 10 sided dice you can't have a target number of 11 as it is impossible. From there you tally up the number of dice rolled that meet or beat that number and that is your amount of "successes" you tell that to the person running the game and they will tell you if you succeeded or not. Typically this is a little less insane than rolling numbers and adding them together thus letting the guy rolling 2 for fighting keep up with the guy rolling 4 for fighting though the 4 dice pool is still doing more. I used to love dice pool systems mostly for the mystery behind them. I can do some basic probability and get the odds behind the basic roll systems (besides Roll and keep) and have no idea what is happening in a dice pool. This quickly turned to crap when I started running my own games and realized I have little clue behind the monster I'd make up or the what amount of successes needed for a challenge would be too easy or too hard for my group. It's still usable I just like having a little more knowledge of my gaming mechanics now. For the most part White Wolf games all use some for of dice pool, I also know of Burning Wheel using one too.
Match Systems
Frankly I have no good name for these systems. They're usually some weird combination of the first 2 but have mechanics that separate them. There are only two I know of for this, Frame work (of Cthulhutech) and One Roll Engine. They both have a variable amount of dice rolled but instead of looking for a target number or adding them all together they look for a pattern of some sort in the dice. Both use matching as one combination, Frame Work will take straights of 3 or more dice or the highest one giving it the nick name of dice poker. From there they differ Framework just adds what it finds together as it's output number and O.R.E. uses the number rolled and how many that were found for it's various aspects. These are the most difficult systems to use, there is no quick glance at them to get a number or amount of successes and there can be a lot of "missing" in these systems if you don't get matches which leads to frustration. Now O.R.E. does a lot for it's single roll; it tries to get hit location, damage, and initiative all from one roll which is interesting but takes a lot of explanation to even get people used to it.
And that's the lowdown of how funny looking dice work in pen and paper games. Partway through this I realized that maybe I should have given a rundown of how pen and paper games work but this subject is more interesting to me at least.
The Basic Roll
Even had to pull out the bold and size change for this but I digress. The basic roll is the tried and true RPG odds generator of choice. Can function on as little as one die and is typically the same for all characters and non playing characters. The most basic idea is you roll a die or a few dice add them together, modify it with some number from somewhere, and compare them to a number to see if it's higher or lower to see if you succeed. Doesn't matter if it's a single nerdy 20 sided die or three standard 6 sided dice the basic mechanic is the same. It's good for fast rolls and for players to know the odds of success, especially if it's percentile and they're trying to roll lower than some attribute generated. I called it the basic roll as a lot of systems love this D&D, d20 systems, Basic role play, and Dark Heresy come to mind. There is one that tweaks this idea but still follows the basic mechanics and that is Legend of the 5 rings and possibly 7 seas. They use a system of Roll and Keep where you roll a number of dice like everyone else but then you pick a few from that. Typically the dice kept are the highest amount but allows an interesting function with a variable number of dice rolled. There is a lot of probability things I could get into about the difference in amount of dice rolled and the horrible results when there is a differnce between two but I think I'll save that for another day as I have a story with that.
The Dice Pool
Dice pools are different than the basic roll for a two reasons. One the amount of dice rolled can greatly vary between players. Two each die rolled in the pool is counted as it's own roll, the dice are not added up like in the basic roll. Typically when you roll a dice pool you are given a target number, this number being lower than the number of sides of the dice used. If you have 10 sided dice you can't have a target number of 11 as it is impossible. From there you tally up the number of dice rolled that meet or beat that number and that is your amount of "successes" you tell that to the person running the game and they will tell you if you succeeded or not. Typically this is a little less insane than rolling numbers and adding them together thus letting the guy rolling 2 for fighting keep up with the guy rolling 4 for fighting though the 4 dice pool is still doing more. I used to love dice pool systems mostly for the mystery behind them. I can do some basic probability and get the odds behind the basic roll systems (besides Roll and keep) and have no idea what is happening in a dice pool. This quickly turned to crap when I started running my own games and realized I have little clue behind the monster I'd make up or the what amount of successes needed for a challenge would be too easy or too hard for my group. It's still usable I just like having a little more knowledge of my gaming mechanics now. For the most part White Wolf games all use some for of dice pool, I also know of Burning Wheel using one too.
Match Systems
Frankly I have no good name for these systems. They're usually some weird combination of the first 2 but have mechanics that separate them. There are only two I know of for this, Frame work (of Cthulhutech) and One Roll Engine. They both have a variable amount of dice rolled but instead of looking for a target number or adding them all together they look for a pattern of some sort in the dice. Both use matching as one combination, Frame Work will take straights of 3 or more dice or the highest one giving it the nick name of dice poker. From there they differ Framework just adds what it finds together as it's output number and O.R.E. uses the number rolled and how many that were found for it's various aspects. These are the most difficult systems to use, there is no quick glance at them to get a number or amount of successes and there can be a lot of "missing" in these systems if you don't get matches which leads to frustration. Now O.R.E. does a lot for it's single roll; it tries to get hit location, damage, and initiative all from one roll which is interesting but takes a lot of explanation to even get people used to it.
And that's the lowdown of how funny looking dice work in pen and paper games. Partway through this I realized that maybe I should have given a rundown of how pen and paper games work but this subject is more interesting to me at least.
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