luckykaa

I'm not really a fan of crunchy RPG systems so the following isn't really a proposal. Just some musing on realism.

Most Role Playing Games use dice for determining whether something is a success. The general principle is skill have numbers. If you want to do something, you pick a skill, roll an appropriate assortment of dice, and either add to skill and compare with a target, or compare with skill (usually roll under). It works, but for modelling realism it's a bit simplistic.

The main problem is that the mechanism is typically the same for all stats. It works for a game but if you think about it it's a little unrealistic. Lets look at some common skills:

The party reaches a door. It's blocked by a boulder. The hefty barbarian goers up to it, rolls a die, and fails. Another character, half his strength has a go, rolls really high, and succeeds. Narratively this makes no sense. Strength should really just be a raw parameter, like height and weight; the amount a character can lift. Multiple party members can combine strength.

They enter an archery contest. This is something that a highly skilled character should win, but, in the case of a severe fluke, an unskilled character might hit a bullseye and a skilled character might just miss. This can be modelled with a single die, although simple addition doesn't really model the probability curve very well.

Modelling this mathematically, we'd have a bell curves. A skilled archer would have a tall narrow curve. And unskilled person with a bow will have a low flat curve. A blindfolded idiot with no idea where the target even is will have a completely flat distribution. Of course the problem here is that to do this accurately we need to use something like the Box-Muller function which is not something we can do with dice.  Something that might work a little better is rolling multiple dice - a number depending on skill level, and taking the highest. The downside to this is that for smaller dice, e.g six sided dice, you'll roll a lot of high numbers which lacks granularity. Could roll multiple d20s perhaps but that feels rather clunky.

So the next challenge they face is knowledge. The Call of Cthulhu mechanic really works pretty well here. You have a knowledge stat - 0-100. Roll under it with percentage die to determine whether you know a specific piece of information. There will be some obscure trivia that people might know, and well known facts that might, for reasons have slipped the expert's mind.

The other one I want to look at is magic.  I always find magic is a little too mechanical. It should be unpredictable!

A skilled mage, throwing a fireball will be able to go for exactly the level they require, at a precise target. An amateur will have much less predictable results. Possibly much more powerful than expected, and possibly with a lot less range. Feather fall - get it wrong and you end up falling too fast, or falling upwards. Giant insect - if it works too well, then it gets messy. Too weak might result in giant insects that don't feel like obeying commands. The idea that comes to mind is that you have a target range for each spell, and you roll a die (perhaps the mage can select the type of die). The skill is the modifier that can be applied after the roll. This is one that I feel will need a lot of play-testing and balance. The other option is the FFG Star Wars mechanism where dice have symbols that indicate not only success and failure, but also "advantage" and "threat".- that is you can succeed but something nasty happens, or fail but something good happens

There are other traits that I have no idea about. How do we do perception? Ideally we don't want the players to know if they fail their perception roll. The mere act of asking for a perception indicates there's something to perceive. But hidden rolls are unsatisfying. Rolls should be based on active player choice, not passive events.

Then there's charisma based skills. How should that work? There has to be something more organic than "You succeed. The other character likes you".

So that's some random musing on making things far too realistic. Perhaps a good idea for a computer based system, where the machine does all the calculations, and things can be as crunchy as they need to be.

Ideally though it would be nice to rely more on "input randomness" than "output randomness". That is, the randomness comes before player choice. An example might be that you roll a die, and have that many action points. Some board games do things this way. This is the typical mechanic with card games. It might be applicable to TTRPG.

There are a whole bunch of other game mechanics that might apply. Bluff, risk, (liars dice combines both and a simple version can be used for conflict resolution).

So what's the conclusion? There isn't one. This is just some random thoughts about balancing realism and crunchiness of a role-playing game.

This was a while ago. Just after my birthday. I received a voucher for an escape room as a birthday present. I also had a day off booked, on the assumption I'd be going away (silly me) so it seemed like a good opportunity.

The game was Alice in Puzzleland. An Alice in Wonderland Themed experience. The aim of the escape room was not to escape per se - There are many escape rooms where that is the goal I'm sure - but to solve puzzles. in this case it was to find the stolen tarts and set up the table for a dinner party.

So we entered. And were transported to Wonderland. Well, a small room with a cottage at one end and a table in a corner. A signpost, and a few other bits and pieces. Puzzles are provided without an explictly stated goal. Just rely on abstract ideas. What does this map have to do with the sign? How do we use this recipe book? All became clear with some lateral thinking.

Clues were provided by the Cheshire Cat. A staff observer who stayed in character, and suggested idea without giving too much away. We needed to find spades. There were two trowels. Flickums insisted that trowels and spades were different and the Cheshire Cat pointed out that the Mad Hatter is a rather silly man who does not know the difference.

I won't go into detail about puzzles. Other people might want to play. Suffice to say we solved it with time to spare.

It was a lot of fun. Realy hope to do another one of these days.

Last day started with a game of "Goth Court". A lightweight roleplay game where players take the party of plaintiffs, defendants and court for  small claim actions in court. One character was horrified that her hairdresser had dyed her hair black as a midnight forest, when she wanted black as a raven's wings. Another was a vampire (played by me) who took a Vampire The Masquerade LARP a little too seriously. I really had good fun. And people liked my vampire, which was nice. Especially when I was complimented by a lady who was really good at character stuff.

After this was the masquerade show and tell, and that was followed by the being unable to get into the panel, then the unexpectedly moved to an earlier slot panel. A little disappointing. 

Did listen to a bit of the European Comics panel, but it was a little tricky to get much out of it given it was mostly a floor discussion and I don't know a lot about the subject.

The convention ended with the closing ceremony, as is traditional, and I headed to the Dead Dog Party (the traditional post con chill out and chat session)

More queues. 

Once again, they underestimated how popular thus would be.

Decided instead to head to the pub crawl. A much more easy going affair. Venue#1 was a pub with a fantastic selection of international beers. Venue #2 was a microbrewery. Venue #3 was a decent Finnish bar. I decided to retire after that. I was suitably merry and wanted to poke my head into the Dead Dog Party. Had calmed down by this point.

And as ever, I get to the end of the con, and want more time there.

I think I'll go to the con in Dublin. They can be frustrating arty tines, but I do seem to enjoy Worldcons.

Left quite late. flickums is apparently still under the delusion that I'm some sort of neat freak and wanted time to clean up. Then her train was cancelled. Then the train was loitering outside Sheffield forever. Ended up diverting to the station to pick her up, where I found the station at exactly the same time as flickums found me.

Saturday involved books. Part 1 was a trip to Sheffield Space Centre. I picked up yet another RPG book for a game that I'll never get round to running. It does involve skyships and swashbuckling though, and flickums hard sold me into buying it. Flick picked up the War Of The Worlds rulebook she was musing over for the past month or so. Then there was a book swap. This meant ditching some of my surplus books and acquiring a similar number of other books. There was a very large pile of books left afterwards. Also there was cake.

Finished the evening by going to see Captain America: Civil War. Started off as aprt of Team Cap. Felt that Tony was actually being the more measured, reasonable one this time. Disappointed by the lack of Peggy Carters.

Sunday we played Lego Indy then went to the pub for Sunday lunch.Then it was time for another Bad Movie Night. Flickums keeps vetoing my suggestions on the grounds that they're terrible. I still can't understand her logic. So, we saw The A-Team and Team America (thus combining into the ultimate jingoistic film, "The A-Team America"). The A-Team is a ridiculous film. Diverges from the original in that people actually get shot!

Monday was Bank Holiday, and involved playing board games. Finally unboxed Concept. Had a go at Wizard Of Oz Munchkin. Sadly there were three of us. It's a 4 player game. It ends too quickly with 3 players and never ends with 5 or more. Followed up with "Hey! That's my fish", which is a nice simple strategy game; then a game of Eight Minute Empire: Legends, which was enjoyable although not really the sort of game I really go for.

Finished up with Roast beef and Bride of Chaotica - one of the best Voyager episodes, or at least something that should appeal to a fan of classic Black and White sci-fi serials. Kate Mulgrew really seemed to be loving this one.

As ever, the weekend came to an end. Why must that always happen!?

Everyone's been talking about Fallout. Thought I'd have a look to see what the fuss was about.

Feels very 90's. Probably because it's a 90's game. Apparently there are another 3 games in the series. But Gog.com has the first in the series for pocket money prices, so that's another game to add to the shelf.

Most of the game is pretty self explanatory although the icons would have been better if they had tooltips on them. It's not hugely obvious.

It's a pretty cool back story. Somwehat satirical. The FMV isn't full motion, but probably would have been had I been playing this in 1998.  So far I've found Vault 15 and established that there's bugger all in there except some loot. I guess the loot is sort of handy. Probably need to get back to Shady Sands. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the brief. Although this is why I tend not to go for RPGs. I lack the attention span to pay attentionb to the cutscenes. Give me a mission!

Wish these rats would stop biting me. They're really quite upsetting.

I recently finished Tomb Raider. I guess this is probably the longest time taken to complete that game, since I bought it when it was still fairly new. Then got bored with it, then bought it again on GoG.com. And yes, this post contains spoilers because I reckon the statute of limitations runs out on that after 19 years.

I still think it's pmne of the greatest games ever. Sure there are issues. Tomb Raider wasn't the first 3D platformer, but the concept was a pretty new idea. For the time, the graphics were pretty impressive - especially the range of animation given to Lara; the story was pretty solid - also unusual for an action based game; and having a female lead in an industry aimed mostly at boys was an inspired decision.

These days though, graphics are better, a storyline is expected, and there are plenty of female characters. The game still stands up well.

Lara herself actually has a personality. She's not just a bimbo with big boobs. The game is full of surprises and clever ideas. It starts off fairly simply, running around ancient tombs, shooting at animals (I always felt bad about this). But then, unexpectedly, Lara enounters a sodding T-Rex! To this day, that's the biggest "Holy crap" moment I've had in a game. But that's just colour.

Later on the fantasy elements are actually relevant to the puzzles. The Midas hand is used to turn lead blocks into gold needed to operate the level exit. Damocles is a room full of swords. The puzzles remain fun and chalenging without being overly frustrating. There's a particularly fun one with a mirror Lara near the end of the game.

Tomb Raider 2 has a lot of improvements, and in most respects is a better game. The graphics glitched less. We had real world locations and funky vehicles to ride on. And I feel a lot better about shooting at people rather than animals. At least I can convince myself they have a choice in the matter. But it doesn't have the originality or much of the cleverness of the original.

I rediscovered Good Old Games a while ago. I had a hankering for original Tomb Raider having been playing TR2 a lot. Also felt I should have a go at Myst.

Turns out that they also offer Beneath a Steel Sky for free.

Have to say I was a little disappointed with Beneath a Steel Sky. It's a point and click very much in the same vein as Lucasarts games, but it has some serious gameplay flaws that arent in the lucasarts games.

Firstly, the nature of puzzles; There desn't seem to be a good reason to want to do things. I need to get past a guard to get inti a chapel. Why? Because he's in the way. No actual reason to go into the church. In fact, the only gameplay result of going in there is that it triggers the next plot occurance. A lot of problems can only be solved by talking to the right person and asking the right question. No indication of why we need to do this. Finally, if you miss a key part of dialogue, there's no way of going back to it. Really annoying if it's been a few days since last played. In Monkey Island, there's always a dialogue tree entry along the lines of "tell me again about XXX".

Tomb Raider 1 and 2 are both fun though. Get a bit bored with the sliding block puzzles because it takes so long, but generally there's a decent balance of puzzle solving, and action. Looks extremely dated after almost 20 years, of course, but the animation is good.

Myst still looks gorgeous after all this time. Probably impossible without a pen and paper to write things down. Strange that I can only carry one piece of paper at  a time though. It's a little tricky working out where I am in some locations. I do love the puzzles. Bit slow though. It takes a long time to get through a certain maze, and I seem to need to do that twice.

Was playing the Total Eclipse remake a while ago. Gets frustrating though. It doesn't have a proper save mechanic. Only save points. I *could* play the Amiga version that lets me save whenever I want, but that has a rather antiquated control mechanism that makes things frustrating.

Wondering what else I should discover or rediscover.

A game I've been intrigued by recently is PSI-5 trading company. I have these retro-gaming whims.

The basic premise is that you're captain of the trading ship. You need to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, while avoiding or destroying raiders. You have 5 crew operating scanners, weapons, navigation, engineering and repairs, and the game involved telling them what to do. It's also really hard, but that's one of those retro gaming things. The game involves micromanaging 5 different stations and keeping track of who's saying what during intense situations.

Essentially it's like Artemis Bridge Simulator except you don't need friends.

The captaining simulation is a very underdeveloped game concept. Real Time Strategy is a lot of fun, but everything in that area seems to be battlefield. I just have a hankering for a game that involves sending disposable redshirts on suicide away missions, investigating anomalies, and fighting invading Glorkons. No idea how the game itself would work, but I think there's potential in there. Something semi-scripted with a set of missions, where your level of success determines how good your next ship is. I wanna be Captain Kirk! Or maybe Picard.

These are the voyages of the Starship Artemis Excalibur Maelstrom Mad Dog it's 50 minute mission to wipe out new life and new civilisations.

talismancer's birthday party and he hired a hotel function room for us to set up a huge multi-ship game of Starship Artemis.

The heroic crew of the Excalibur joined the Artemis and a bunch of other ships, protecting our fleet from the evil Kralien invaders! Our heroic crew, many of whom had never driven a space ship before leapt into action, and destroyed the invaders. First advance party dispatched, we went on our way to investigate an anomalous anomaly. It turned out to be a black hole. And our somewhat incompetent driver (i.e. me) got a bit too close. Ooops. Fortunately we were resurrected. So was everything else.

The heroic crew of the Maelstrom entered the next fray! As the genius engineer, I actually had very little to do. They didn't suffer nearly enough damage! They needed a lunatic at the helm! penguin_worship arrived and took comms.

So for my next tour of duty I acquired the SS Mad Dog! A fine missile boat. No beam weapons but more than enough torpedo tubes. Our comms officer took the weapons station and we dived right in there. it was a tough game. We lost 3 stations near the start leaving just one to try to supply the entire war effort. We leapt into the fray, buzzing those damn Alien Kraliens, firing volleys of missiles at them, until, alas, our energy reserves ran dry, and so did our torpedo tubes. We pulled away and dropped mines, but it was all for nought as we were overwhelmed and outnumbered.

The universe couldn't handle so much awesome as all our ships though, (the server choked on 5 ships), so we were forced to go down to 4. Mad Dog was upgraded to a slower heavier battleship because weapons crews wanted beam weapons. Not nearly as much fun to fly, and nowhere near as capable of harrying the alien scum! But then my mad weapons officer went out the airlock to get a train.

Good fun. Will need to get others to play this.

Dear livegerbil.

Today autumn arrived. It announced itself with a downpour. As luck would have it I was wearing particularly absorbent clothes, so I was soaked to the skin. Turns out that isn't just a figure of speech. Funny think about cycling in a torrential downpour, the rain seems to be blowing in your face whichever way you turn. Decided to take a break halfway home and get a burger. The food was hot and McDonalds was warm and dry.

I also had joined a boardgames meetup group. Six nominal attendees plus a load of people on the parallel group on facebook. There were threat of Monopoly, but luckily there were far too many of us so the rest of us played card against humanity - the Evil twin of Apples to Apples. Having successfully lost all faith in humanity we decided to play a game of Mafia (a.k.a. werewolf, traitor, spy, assassin, alien mutant, whatever). This was fun but 7 people is really an absolute minimum number of players. Did try to grab a bunch of others but they'd just started to play cash and guns.

It was fun, and I now hate almost everyone and mistrust the rest.