[Ar-list] Re: Ar-list digest, Vol 1 #5 - 2 msgs

[Altrichter Ferenc]

ar-list-request@delfax.net 2001.12.03. 12:00:09 -5h-kor írta:
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Thoughts on various matters (Carter Butts)
>    2. Re: Thoughts on various matters (Joe Mason)
> 
> --__--__--
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001 17:07:56 -0500
> From: Carter Butts <ctb@andrew.cmu.edu>
> Reply-To: ctb@andrew.cmu.edu
> To: ar-list@delfax.net
> Subject: [Ar-list] Thoughts on various matters
> 
> Howdy.  I've been out of town for the most part since the discussion 
> started, but have read the comments with interest.  (I was almost afraid 
> to say anything, since comments by the initial authors seem to have a 
> Kiss of Death effect on the list....I'll brave it, though.  :_))  I 
> don't want to interrupt the flow, but let me make a few comments on 
> several of the issues which have been raised....
> 
> 1. Freudian attributes
> 
> 	In any event, I'd be interested in seeing some MRSs on this topic, to see 
> what people can come up with.  In terms of breaking existing rules, IIRC 
> Chameleon, A New Religion (still an eternal draft), and the Mindrunning 
> MRS (an even more eternal draft) use the psycho-social attributes to at 
> least some degree.  Mindrunning (again, IIRC) mostly focuses on Identity 
> (IDT), though, which will default back up to EGO or WIL in most cases. 
> As for the other two, I don't think many special rules are invoked by 
> the reality guides, so you could easily replace the existing 
> psycho-social attributes with something else.  (Character creation in A 
> New Religion would have to be tweaked, though.)
> 

This reminds me:

I'd urge everybody to publish prereleases of anything they're doing for the following reasons:
1, this way everybody could see that AR isn't all dead yet.
2, this way we could know what other people are working on.
3, this way if somebody must stop a project - for whatever reason - others can continue his work (and it's not all lost time).

I'd like to stress the need for at least two copies of every document for AR:
1, this way if one is lost due to a catastrophe or a hard disk crash or anything else a copy will still remain and it can be duplicated again.
2, I think it's ideal if the documents are stockpiled on the AR site and the home sites of the authors (this way the author can make changes to his version of the document and publish always the newest version while there's always a version of all (or almost all) AR documents available on a general site to the public).

I think there's no room for intellectual pride - if the document is not ready note that in the document (you could point out likely changes too), but do publish what you have ready.

> 2. Attribute names
> 
> 	So, anyway, about those names: is there anything wrong with renaming 
> them?  In principle not (hell, you can do anything you like), but I 
> would personally advise restraint in this matter.  If every reality 
> guide has a different name for "intelligence" (for instance), it's going 
> to get very hard to tell what's going on.  Since attributes (unlike 
> skills) are taken to be universal, renaming them at every pass runs the 
> risk of obscuring the underlying similarity between game worlds, therby 
> making things harder for players.  Of course, that's just my opinion, 
> and (as has been emphasized by others) the basic game system is robust 
> to such matters....
> 

I think changing the names is all right (even without changing their roles) - but in that case this should be very carefully documented in a separate chapter that should be called sg. like: changes compared to the PRG.

OTOH if this isn't necessary for campaign flavor, you should clearly avoid this type of changes as they increase the difficulty of understanding the rules of that specific campaign.

> 3. On the DRF as basic mechanism
> 
> 	As Pierce notes, however, we could use something else.  Logit or probit 
> models would be the obvious alternatives, and have the appealing side 
> effect of allowing the zealous to easily "fit" AR attributes from 
> empirical data using standard statistical packages.  (Wouldn't that be a 
> great homework assignment for a stats class?  ;-))  These have very 
> light tails, however, which means that convergence to sure 
> thing/guaranteed failure will be sharper for sufficiently large 
> attribute values.  Also, it is still possible to fit data using the 
> existing DRF via heuristic maximum likelihood (not that I expect this to 
> be a major concern for most people), so the statistical advantages may 
> not be terribly important in practice.  <shrug>  Here again, experiment 
> and see what you like.
> 

Have you ever thought about using the normal distribution? It is said to have all kind of nice properties.

> 4. Adjusting the precision of the DRF
> 
> 	Altrichter Ferenc mentions the idea of implementing the game using d20s 
> instead of d100s.  This is eminently doable: since the rules are 
> continuous, even the percentile system is actually just an 
> approximation, and you can use d1000s, d10s, d4s, or whatever, depending 
> on the desired level of precision.  Here's what you need to do: treating 
> everything else as-is, just create a new DRF table based on the scores 
> for probabilities 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, ... 0.95, 1.0.  These correspond to 
> rolls of 1 through 20, respectively, and you choose your rolling target 
> by rounding up.  (If you like, you can go from 0 to 0.95 and round 
> down...this might make more sense, actually, but it's up to you.)  The 
> basic idea is that you are using the dice to generate uniform random 
> numbers in the [0,1] interval and comparing them to the appropriate 
> rolling target (as generated by the DRF)...the level of precision here 
> is entirely up to you.  In test games, Karim usually uses a calculator 
> or PDA with the DRF pre-programmed, and thus we get nearly exact values; 
> this could be fun or overkill, depending on your perspective.  I think 
> that percentile dice are a nice compromise, but this is really a matter 
> of personal preference.
> 

My friends usually dislike the use of tables and calculators when playing RPGs. (I have thought about replacing them, but then I realized that replacing the d100 with d20 is simpler. ;-) )

Jokes aside Percentile dice are nice because they're very intuitive, however I still think some players dislike the use of tables and calculators and therefore if my time permits I'll finish the MRS I was talking about. (Unfortunately as it affects the very core concept of the game this module might affect quite a lot of things and therefore may need quite a lot of thinking on my side (which is one of my weaknesses 8-o ).)

> 5. Fast action
> 
> 	Perhaps there's a misstatement (it wouldn't be the first one) in the PRG, 
> but IIRC fast action doesn't require a roll for each action.  You make 
> one initiative roll per round, which gives you your "budget" of action 
> counts to spend for until the next round.  Everything else is simply a 
> matter of deducting the appropriate number of action counts from your 
> budget when your number comes up...when everyone gets to 0 or below, the 
> new round is declared.  (Of course, any debts from one round are 
> deducted from your new ACs for the next one.)  One can debate whether we 
> need these per-round initiative rolls (we could just let time flow 
> continuously, mapping ACs to some set fraction of a second, and leave it 
> at that), but you're certainly not supposed to roll with each _action_. 
>   Hopefully this is a misunderstanding rather than a typo.  :-)
> 
> 6. Too much calculation
> 
> 	To get to the more general point of whether there is too much calculation 
> as-is, this is always a tricky issue.  Of course, things should be kept 
> as simple as possible, but OTOH there have been a lot of calls for fancy 
> complex things (like bleeding and organ failure rules :-)) which are 
> just not possible to implement in a realistic way without a little extra 
> effort.  Still, I think there are things that can be readily 
> improved/simplified.  Training and aging are a mess as-is, and need to 

Realistic or not isn't all that significant - as far as I can judge FUZION isn't realistic at all - still it's a quite playable and enjoyable game.

IMHO in order to attract players who would be frightened by AR's mathematical complexity (the DRF _is_ quite frightening to those who don't like math) we should have already written a simplified rule set - actually my proposal to use d20 instead of d100 is based on this concept. A simplified rule set should be simplified in 2 ways: 1, all unnecessary detail and explanation should be removed from the PRG (like how the DRF works and why we are doing that (maybe except for a brief textual explanation)) 2, the number of options should be decreased 3, explanations and examples should be provided for the most important rule mechanics.

The DRF is sometimes one of the weaknesses of AR - it's so intuitive once one grasps it that designers (at least me) tend to overuse it in certain cases. This is a real danger - we should sometimes rather avoid the usage of DRF and tests and simply use rather some elementary math.

For example:
----
Bleeding - Modular Rule Supplement:

There are two categories of wounds: Wounds and Bleeding Wounds.
All damage caused by piercing and cutting damage sources is recorded as Bleeding Wound, all other damage is recorded as Wound.
If a Bleeding Wound is tended to (a successful First Aid role suffices) it becomes a Wound.
Every minute apply Bleeding Damage equal to Bleeding Wound/10 to every character that has a Bleeding Wound (round downwards). Bleeding Damage can't be avoided (except by changing the status of the Bleeding Wound to Wound) and is considered to be a (normal) Wound.

End of MRS
----

See - it's simple (you needn't divide either simply discard the last digit of your Bleeding Wounds), maybe not too realistic, but it represents an added factor of danger and doesn't use the DRF. Anything that would have used the DRF would have required more calculation - in exchange it wouldn't have been deterministic and it would probably have been more realistic.

Though this rule doesn't compare in any way to the greatness/significance of the PRG and it's concepts (I really think that the PRG contains some of the best ideas I've seen in an RPG Engine) - it is playable and probably adds to the fun and complexity of the game without requiring much book-keeping.

All those different ideas for bleeding and organ failures should have been written up like the rule supplement above and supplied to the eager would be AR players. The decision should be theirs whether they want to use one of these or not.

> be revised.  For this, I need to go try to dig up some good references 
> on learning curves (does anyone have any?), and think a bit more about a 
> viable random process model for attribute evolution.  The trick, of 
> course, is to find a reasonable model which reduces to some sort of 
> simple solution...the underlying theory can be very complex, so long as 
> the answer which comes out is easy to implement.  After many discussions 
> re: armor, we had a hard time coming up with something much simpler than 
> the existing rules which was also very realistic; there's progress which 
> could be made here, as well.  One frustration here is a lack of any real 
> data on the subject.  I've got some stopping power statistics on modern 
> weapons which can be used to calibrate the damage system (and I can 
> fudge it for ancient weapons), but precious little on armor.  My 
> engineering friends haven't been very helpful here, either, since their 
> concensus seems to be that armor/weapon interactions are very 
> complicated.  :-)  Barring further insight, then, I suppose we must go 
> with what we have....
> 

If we strive for realism (what the PRG most of the time does) this is true. If we don't we can simply fudge the rules. ;-)

> -----
> 
> OK, so there are some rambling reactions to some of the issues which 
> have been raised.  I'm glad to see a new outbreak of discussion, and 
> thanks, BTW, for the positive comments.  (Joe Mason's comment that he 
> thought that the game was an elaborate joke at first doesn't count. 
> ;-))  I'll be interested in hearing what you folx come up with, though 
> my participation in the discussion may be intermittent...I've got to fly 
> out to give a talk on Tuesday, and I haven't finished preparing it yet. 
>   :-(  But hey, the first draft of my thesis is done, and I have a job 
> offer, so life isn't all bad.  If only I could think of a way to work AR 
> development into an undergraduate course....
> 

Good luck to this and everything above! :-)

>      -Carter
> 

Ferenc