Tabletop RPG Metathread: We Like To Party

[Student of Trinity]

Of course — I'm just kibitzing. I'd feel bad if you changed anything for me, since not only am I not involved, I don't even really have a clear idea what AimHack is like to play.

 

So even if I'm right about this kind of system for live games, it's possible that it's better for AimHack. Role playing a serious argument fast takes a lot of bandwidth.

 

Otherwise, the point about harmony through objectivity is well taken. Most of my RPG experience is from cases where for one reason or another people didn't object much — either I was the one long-term GM and had a pretty good record for fairness and making things interesting, or I was the players' uncle.

[Triumph]

First thought: I think this has potential as a fun sort of diplomacy mini-game that a DM might occasionally utilize. Just as DMs sometimes use other special challenges for players, formal debates or negotiations (using these rules) could be used. I think it would be awfully slow and messy for anything more than occasional use. I think there are plenty of diplomacy / composure type situations where there isn't really a formal argument going on, and so these rules would be inappropriate.

 

I had to read through the rules a couple times to make sense of them...but I think I get it. Once I read through a couple times, I started to grasp the terminology, but initially I felt the burdens and exchanges were kind of confusing.

 

I'm also a little unsure how much it adds to the overall role playing experience. It looks to me like this says "Instead of rolling one time for Composure when talking to an NPC, roll multiple times and use these rules to decide who wins." But we don't need new rules to implement, just have the DM require multiple Composure roles during a scene. With or without the new rolls, roles must still be played (i.e. PC talking).

 

"However, if any Points were scored against the winner, the loser can choose one part of their argument that maintains its credibility per Point scored."

 

I did not understand this part.

 

Reading through the discussion, I do see the point about creating an objective standard for deciding for the outcome of a negotiation. And yet so much of the behind-the-scenes aspects of AIMHack seem to be loose and fuzzy anyway (i.e. DM discretion), I'm not sure Composure challenges really merit special rules.

 

I agree with the concern that rules limit opportunities for multiple characters to participate in a debate or negotiation.

 

Regarding use / abuse / ignoring of Walking Away, maybe a good reminder to players to concentrate on role-playing, focusing how the characters would act, would help players to view the option more, err, realistically?

 

One last thought is that I still don't understand what the consequences of winning or losing an argument are. Maybe that'll be completely context-dependent, but as written, I wasn't clear on what it really MEANS to win / lose / walk away from a Composure challenge like this.

 

I hope all this rambling is helpful.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

First thought: I think this has potential as a fun sort of diplomacy mini-game that a DM might occasionally utilize. Just as DMs sometimes use other special challenges for players, formal debates or negotiations (using these rules) could be used. I think it would be awfully slow and messy for anything more than occasional use. I think there are plenty of diplomacy / composure type situations where there isn't really a formal argument going on, and so these rules would be inappropriate.

Yeah, the background to the design of these rules is that the next campaign I run, if I run a next campaign, may include a court case, and I wanted a way to model it. They're not rules that I expect or want to be brought into play every time there's a disagreement.

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I'm also a little unsure how much it adds to the overall role playing experience. It looks to me like this says "Instead of rolling one time for Composure when talking to an NPC, roll multiple times and use these rules to decide who wins." But we don't need new rules to implement, just have the DM require multiple Composure roles during a scene. With or without the new rolls, roles must still be played (i.e. PC talking).

It's a bit more nuanced than that, since there are other possible results that are hard to extract from one guy rolling Composure without further mechanics, like "everybody loses". I'm of the school of thought that holds that the purpose of formal rules in an RPG is to produce the potential for outcomes that are undesired by everybody at the table, but compelling enough that the group agrees to abide by them.

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"However, if any Points were scored against the winner, the loser can choose one part of their argument that maintains its credibility per Point scored."

I did not understand this part.

Basically, the loser gets to extract one compromise from the winner per Point they scored before losing. I'll tighten up the wording on that.

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I agree with the concern that rules limit opportunities for multiple characters to participate in a debate or negotiation.

Hmm. I may just straight-up make it more like combat, with every character being able to participate in every Exchange but the rate of increase of the Burden being dependent on the number of participants. Or something. I'll give it some thought.

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Regarding use / abuse / ignoring of Walking Away, maybe a good reminder to players to concentrate on role-playing, focusing how the characters would act, would help players to view the option more, err, realistically?

Considering that players almost always just have their characters do their thing regardless of whether it's mechanically beneficial, I'm not sure this warning is necessary given the social dynamics of our circle.

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One last thought is that I still don't understand what the consequences of winning or losing an argument are. Maybe that'll be completely context-dependent, but as written, I wasn't clear on what it really MEANS to win / lose / walk away from a Composure challenge like this.

Basically, if you win an argument you successfully make your opponent look like a fool in front of everyone who's watching. If you lose an argument your opponent makes you look like a fool. If you successfully walk away you both leave with your dignity intact, and if there's a Breakdown you both look like fools.

[Triumph]

Aha aha! Thanks for the clarifying. Your responses definitely elucidate.

 

Perhaps the entire little system you've devised could be labeled as "optional debate / negotiation rules," (or some such thing) rather than as "social conflict system" or the like? I think having the more focused label up front would help me (and perhaps other users of AIMHack) understand better what I was looking at when I start reading the rules for the first time.

[Rowen]

Things that I liked or didn't like or just thoughts about Party of Three are as follow.

 

~Common Background. Before I got any character sheets we all agreed that the party knew each other and had some experience working together in the past. One of the key points to the background was that the characters were friends. This meant that they worked very well together (better then any other campaign I have read or been in so far I think) and the trusted each other. The trust was critical for this party as without it they would have fallen apart.

 

The common background allowed me to use their past as a part of the campaign and help in character development. It also allowed me the challenge of trying to split the party trust in some way to add to the story and give the players something to overcome that a roll from a d20 could not.

 

Click to reveal..

Common backgrounds is something I will do again.

 

~Health. I always fret over huge HP. I just don't feel that the 4 mage should not have 56 HP points while the tank has 121. That is worse inflation then we have in real life.

 

I based character HP on this: 10+(3*STR). This meant that unless you put a point into your STR every level up, your HP would not change. And right along with this I changed/modified healing spells but this should be its own point.

 

Click to reveal..

Character HP did not feel bloated to me as the GM.

 

~Healing Spells. I have always felt that a healing spell costing stamina was very heavy price to put on the healer in caparison to the rest of the party. The idea that I stole from others was to heal a smaller dice + a bonus or skill of some sort. After some talking and thinking I settled on this for healing. 2d3+Healing Skill+(-2 per repeated cast on each character).

 

This meant that you could not just heal the whole party damage while you killed an entire city. After so many casts, your healing spells would have no effect for the rest of that game day.

 

As the campaign go closer to the end I did become agitated with the healing spell as it made character HP become bloated once more. Get hit for 6 damage, get healed for 13. Next cast is still going to heal you more then the damage you take so no worries, do whatever you want (Thank you for not exploiting this in the game).

 

To match the healing spell to the HP gain that I like I think that a simple change will be in order for the next campaign. 2d3+(Healing Skill/2(rounded down))+(-2 per repeated cast on each character) This will lower the amount of HP healed a lot. It will also discourage mini healers with 1 or 2 points in a healing skill acting as a main party healer for a whole campaign while still enabling them to heal themselves to a degree.

 

Click to reveal..

Change spell healing.

 

~NPC. If you read a few logs you will see that I tried to name lots of different NPC's and give them a little personality. That is a HUGE undertaking.

 

First off, write all the names down someplace so you do not act like I did and have to ask the players what a NPC was named. It always slowed down the session and ruined the moment.

 

Second off, when they kill nameless on dimensional NPC and then loot them you can make it into a two dimensional NPC really easy. Have the player find a hand written note done by the NPC's grandchild. It makes the player think twice about having killed some little innocent child's grandparent and just might change how they treat NPC in the future (most likely not).

 

One big thing I liked to do with NPC's was have them in sevral sessions and build up personalities with each one. Strict sense of duty at all cost, but hides the weight of it from others; be cheery and happy in the face of anything, but also humble and caring; abide your time and listen and watch as you manipulate others into doing what you want them to do.

 

A NPC with or without a personality really can make or break a session so do what you must.

 

Click to reveal..

More personality means it really feels like the NPC are other players.

 

I will put up more as they come to me. I have already rewritten this three times due to my computer crashing so I am going to post what I have now.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Rowen

~Healing Spells. I have always felt that a healing spell costing stamina was very heavy price to put on the healer in caparison to the rest of the party. The idea that I stole from others was to heal a smaller dice + a bonus or skill of some sort. After some talking and thinking I settled on this for healing. 2d3+Healing Skill+(-2 per repeated cast on each character).

See, it doesn't seem that big a price to me. Magical healing should not be a simple and easy affair; we're talking anything from plugging holes to realigning and reshaping crushed bones to fixing brain damage. That's going to take time, and it's going to take a whole crapload of energy.

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As the campaign go closer to the end I did become agitated with the healing spell as it made character HP become bloated once more. Get hit for 6 damage, get healed for 13. Next cast is still going to heal you more then the damage you take so no worries, do whatever you want (Thank you for not exploiting this in the game).

Um, hate to break it to you, but that's not exploiting, that's stupid. The smart thing to do is to wait after that 6 damage, let the character get hit again for another 6, and THEN heal for 13. It basically erases two hits instead of one, and you've got extra healing energy left over to boot. And that was pretty much what Arell did.

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To match the healing spell to the HP gain that I like I think that a simple change will be in order for the next campaign. 2d3+(Healing Skill/2(rounded down))+(-2 per repeated cast on each character)

Okay, time-out here. Seeing as you've never played a healer, I think it's time you listened to someone who's played two (three, if you count Mal's heavy FA).

Part of the trick to balancing healing is making sure it's effective while still limited in what it can do. Draining stamina accomplishes this very effectively, but having a set pool of energy does not. Why?

Basically, because there's no real strategy to your new healing system. Either you've got enough energy to heal the character to good health, or you don't and the character dies or remains on last legs. There's no in-between, no compromise, and no decisions to make. And heaven forbid if someone with subpar healing has been attending to the character first or the dice go bad, because that character will wind up royally screwed.

With stamina, it's a balancing act. Your healing spells are always effective (save for special circumstances), but you've only got so many casts, and you have to make tough choices. Do I chug this stamina potion so I have enough energy to heal Billy? Should I use this flashy unstoppable spell now, or save stamina for healing? Do I want to do heavy healing now, or hold back to see who needs it the most?

(Also, on the topic of exploits: under the energy pool system, there's nothing stopping a healer from blowing its remaining energy at the end of the day, meaning that characters can get tons of free healing at no cost.)

Another thing you're not considering is how your magical healing system is impacting other forms of healing. Or, to put it another way: in roughly 20 sessions, how many times was the first aid skill used to heal injuries?

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Nioca

See, it doesn't seem that big a price to me. Magical healing should not be a simple and easy affair; we're talking anything from plugging holes to realigning and reshaping crushed bones to fixing brain damage. That's going to take time, and it's going to take a whole crapload of energy.

Plus, there are plenty of other things you can do with any of the magic schools that have healing in them, and not all of those other things require stamina. If you just want to help keep the party's HP up, that's kind of what First Aid is for, and FA doesn't traditionally cost stamina.

[Lilith]

Nikki's End of Days campaign has just concluded, and final logs/epilogues are likely to be posted soon. I guess this is probably the thread in which to do a postmortem for the benefit of future generations, if Nikki's okay with it.

 

EDIT: On another note, this article is relevant to some of the things I've been doing -- and some of the things I deliberately haven't been doing -- in ATCT.

[Dintiradan]

What part of that article are you referring to? The "Party Hydra" portion, or the "Bearing Witness" portion, or both at once? I've been trying to read up on Forge terminology, but it's a bit of a slog. Not Scientology-level difficult, but it still takes a while to decipher.

 

I'm wondering what the root cause of the Party Hydra is. Earlier in this thread, I said that the problem was mitigated with online play and exacerbated with face-to-face play. I still think that's true, but now I'm beginning to think that the root cause is a lack of Instigators in the party.

 

This won't be a surprise to anyone who plays with me, but Instigator is the role I have the most difficulty slipping into. Part of this is due to some of my meatspace campaigns that had an adversarial relationship between game master and players (thus "making stupid plays" can cause PC deaths), part of this is due to a couple of people who used "being in character" as an excuse to just be jerks. But I think it's more of the former than the latter: players are more likely to have their characters form a "hydra" if they feel they have to increase their chance of "success". To (mis?)use my newfangled Forge terminology, is the Party Hydra a symptom of "Gamist" thinking applied to non-Gamist campaigns?

 

(Or am I misunderstanding everything and should step out of this theory thread before I embarrass myself further?)

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

I'm wondering what the root cause of the Party Hydra is. Earlier in this thread, I said that the problem was mitigated with online play and exacerbated with face-to-face play. I still think that's true, but now I'm beginning to think that the root cause is a lack of Instigators in the party.

i mostly meant the party hydra thing

and i think the #1 cause of the party hydra is the existence of gameplay elements that require large amounts of GM attention to resolve, like combat, during which nobody who isn't involved can really get anything done. this discourages PCs from going off on their own and doing their own thing because if they do then if anything GM-intervention-heavy happens to part of the party the other part gets left out while it's resolved. it's the Decker Problem but applied to the whole group instead of the individual

but yeah, this is relevant to my experience with ATCT insofar as I've consciously been not discouraging the party from splitting up, and it's worked out so far. i'm going to continue that policy as far as i can because i want to see just what its limits are

it's worth keeping in mind, though, that a common reason for the party hydra is simply that the players want the PCs to stay together so that they can interact with each other, and the best way to keep them together is to give them all roughly the same goals. this is not necessarily a problem in need of a solution!

[Nioca]

With EoD wrapped up, there's a couple things I'd like to post observations about.

 

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Characters and Expectations

 

One thing that definitely comes to mind is what's expected of characters. The player, the rest of the party, and the DM all have their own expectations of each character, dependent on how the character is initially presented and evolving as that character is played. This is neither good nor bad; it just helps define each player's role in the party.

 

Naturally, when you've got several different sets of eyes examining the same character, different expectations crop up. Furthermore, the expectations of everyone, including the player, can change as the character is played. This can lead to moments that seem perfectly in-character to the player, but out of left field to the party or DM. Again, not necessarily good or bad; shaking up or defying the expectations of the party or DM can be important for character development of both the player's character and those around him/her. Especially interesting is when a player defies their own expectations because of in-universe events (which can again lead to character development).

 

Of course, there's a difference between shaking up expectations and creating false ones. It's one thing if a veritable paladin of virtue has a fall from grace, but quite another if said virtuous paladin defaults to punting puppies into orphanages he's set on fire. While the player is obviously the master of his/her own character, the expectations he/she creates for the party and DM should at mesh somewhat with how he/she intends to portray him/her.

 

Additionally, another thing I've noticed is that it's generally a bad idea for the DM to rely on what he/she expects a character to do, both because the DM's expectations may lead him/her astray, AND because the character might act in defiance of expectation. At best, this can result in events being derailed, and at worst, it can cause disappointment and frustration on both sides.

 

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Ephesian System vs. Lilithian System: Fight!

 

As you may be aware, Lilith's trying out a purely skill-based system for AtCT. While I obviously can't speak for everyone, my opinions on this are mixed. On one hand, the skill point system does remove the attributes. It also allows for a greater degree of customization. And, of course, it does work.

 

However, I don't think it works quite as well as having more clearly defined levels and attributes. Yes, the levels are arbitrary, but simply handing out skill points feels more arbitrary than the levels ever did. Additionally, compensating for the lack of attributes has actually made the system more complicated, not less; instead of having a single attribute tied to health, you've got three skills that have to be calculated differently depending on which skill is stronger. Instead of having some skill points and a few attribute points, you've got a whole crapload of skill points to spread across several skills. Defense? It's based on Skills A, B, or C, but with an ill-defined synergy bonus from having two or all three, not counting what armor might do.

 

Plus, now you have Athletics and Acrobatics, which are basically just STR and DEX in a skill-flavored coating.

 

In addition, the system, as it currently stands, can be min-maxed to rather horrific effect. Melee skill is now basically a 'win' button for combat, by providing health, defense, AND attack power in one skill. Magic is still as strong as ever, but thanks to the fact that it's now based on the skill system, it's rather trivial to advance both melee and magic together without losing a whole lot from either. Even without min-maxing, it can create some rather alarming power disparities which can be hard to balance for. In a way, this is something the attributes did better; barring major minmaxing (or multiple bad decisions on a player's part), it was hard to actually create a massive power disparity (aside from the weird HP system).

 

On top of that, you have to level the character up every. single. session. Makes it feel less like a reward, and more like general housekeeping. But maybe that one's just me.

 

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There's a couple more things I want to comment on, but I want to get this post out the door sometime this century.

[Lilith]

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However, I don't think it works quite as well as having more clearly defined levels and attributes. Yes, the levels are arbitrary, but simply handing out skill points feels more arbitrary than the levels ever did.

Can you elaborate on this?

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Additionally, compensating for the lack of attributes has actually made the system more complicated, not less; instead of having a single attribute tied to health, you've got three skills that have to be calculated differently depending on which skill is stronger. Instead of having some skill points and a few attribute points, you've got a whole crapload of skill points to spread across several skills. Defense? It's based on Skills A, B, or C, but with an ill-defined synergy bonus from having two or all three, not counting what armor might do.

The way I'm handling synergy bonuses at the moment is that you get a +1 bonus if the total skill point investment in all synergy skills is at least half the skill point investment in the highest skill, and a +2 bonus if it's equal to or greater than the investment in the highest skill. Yes, this is unnecessarily complicated and a pain to work out.

I agree that more mechanical transparency is desirable, but not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of AIMhack players don't seem to care very much about the mechanics underlying their abilities anyway, and complicated equations scare people off. Ultimately the solution to this is to have mechanics that don't require complicated equations, but oh well.

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In addition, the system, as it currently stands, can be min-maxed to rather horrific effect. Melee skill is now basically a 'win' button for combat, by providing health, defense, AND attack power in one skill. Magic is still as strong as ever, but thanks to the fact that it's now based on the skill system, it's rather trivial to advance both melee and magic together without losing a whole lot from either. Even without min-maxing, it can create some rather alarming power disparities which can be hard to balance for. In a way, this is something the attributes did better; barring major minmaxing (or multiple bad decisions on a player's part), it was hard to actually create a massive power disparity (aside from the weird HP system).

I can't totally disagree with this. The way defences work in particular under the ATCT system does still feel hacky and unbalanced to me. Then again, it's hacky and unbalanced in the attribute-based system too. I'm not convinced that the new system as a whole is more prone to over-optimisation than the old one: a pure mage in the level/attribute system was certainly no less powerful than in the ATCT system. And as far as it being easy to be fairly good at both melee and magic... that's a feature rather than a bug, as far as I'm concerned, and hybrid characters do still end up a little behind for the same investment. Keep in mind that a +2 difference in a skill is actually pretty big: if you go from hitting 50% of the time to 60% of the time, you've increased your damage output per round by 20%.

I think for some future campaign I really am just going to have to bite the bullet and have everyone designate a primary combat skill that levels up at a predefined rate, if I'm serious about keeping everyone roughly equally combat-effective without implementing a full-on class system. I'm not very happy about the prospect, though.

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On top of that, you have to level the character up every. single. session. Makes it feel less like a reward, and more like general housekeeping. But maybe that one's just me.

I don't think it's just you: I've noticed that in general people have taken a lot longer to post levelups in this campaign than they did in City of Hope, even though they levelled up after most sessions in CoH anyway. It does suggest a lack of enthusiasm about levelling up. I think I'm going to have to go read up on some more theory about the difference between an advancement system and a reward system and try to apply it to future campaigns.

[Triumph]

Does eagerness to level up have anything to do with how competent / powerful players already feel? If a player feels his or her character is already sufficiently developed and capable of functioning in campaign, is there less drive to boost the character? Versus a player who feels his or her character needs desperately needs those extra skills to have a chance to survive next time, or who felt the character was under-developed at level 1 and needs more points to flesh out the original character concept? Just my ponderings, recalling how I've felt about "level-ups" at different points in the campaign's I've played. One trend in more recent campaigns seems to starting the characters out a higher "level" than the earliest AIMHack campaigns did.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Does eagerness to level up have anything to do with how competent / powerful players already feel? If a player feels his or her character is already sufficiently developed and capable of functioning in campaign, is there less drive to boost the character? Versus a player who feels his or her character needs desperately needs those extra skills to have a chance to survive next time, or who felt the character was under-developed at level 1 and needs more points to flesh out the original character concept? Just my ponderings, recalling how I've felt about "level-ups" at different points in the campaign's I've played. One trend in more recent campaigns seems to starting the characters out a higher "level" than the earliest AIMHack campaigns did.

Maybe. The ROMD party was generally pretty good about levelling up on time, though (uh, the whole three times we actually levelled up, at least.)

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Quote:

Yes, the levels are arbitrary, but simply handing out skill points feels more arbitrary than the levels ever did.

Can you elaborate on this?

With levels, you know ahead of time what you're handing out. A stat point and a predefined amount of XP. You only have to ask yourself one yes/no question: Has the party earned a level?

With XP only, you have to evaluate how much they earned each session. How much is burning down a tavern worth? 2 XP? 4 XP? What about fighting off a swarm of wasps, is that a couple XP right there? Basically, you have to try and put a value tag on the party's progress.

Both processes are pretty arbitrary, but trying to actually put a value the party's progress seems more arbitrary to me than just rewarding them with a level now and then.

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Additionally, compensating for the lack of attributes has actually made the system more complicated, not less; instead of having a single attribute tied to health, you've got three skills that have to be calculated differently depending on which skill is stronger. Instead of having some skill points and a few attribute points, you've got a whole crapload of skill points to spread across several skills. Defense? It's based on Skills A, B, or C, but with an ill-defined synergy bonus from having two or all three, not counting what armor might do.

The way I'm handling synergy bonuses at the moment is that you get a +1 bonus if the total skill point investment in all synergy skills is at least half the skill point investment in the highest skill, and a +2 bonus if it's equal to or greater than the investment in the highest skill. Yes, this is unnecessarily complicated and a pain to work out.

I agree that more mechanical transparency is desirable, but not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of AIMhack players don't seem to care very much about the mechanics underlying their abilities anyway, and complicated equations scare people off. Ultimately the solution to this is to have mechanics that don't require complicated equations, but oh well.

Yeah, underlying mechanics usually isn't a major issue with the players we have now. I still think it's important to make sure everything runs logically and smoothly under the hood, though, because while it may not matter much to the players, you can bet money that it'll matter to anyone who tries to DM the system.

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In addition, the system, as it currently stands, can be min-maxed to rather horrific effect. Melee skill is now basically a 'win' button for combat, by providing health, defense, AND attack power in one skill. Magic is still as strong as ever, but thanks to the fact that it's now based on the skill system, it's rather trivial to advance both melee and magic together without losing a whole lot from either. Even without min-maxing, it can create some rather alarming power disparities which can be hard to balance for. In a way, this is something the attributes did better; barring major minmaxing (or multiple bad decisions on a player's part), it was hard to actually create a massive power disparity (aside from the weird HP system).

I can't totally disagree with this. The way defences work in particular under the ATCT system does still feel hacky and unbalanced to me. Then again, it's hacky and unbalanced in the attribute-based system too. I'm not convinced that the new system as a whole is more prone to over-optimisation than the old one: a pure mage in the level/attribute system was certainly no less powerful than in the ATCT system. And as far as it being easy to be fairly good at both melee and magic... that's a feature rather than a bug, as far as I'm concerned, and hybrid characters do still end up a little behind for the same investment. Keep in mind that a +2 difference in a skill is actually pretty big: if you go from hitting 50% of the time to 60% of the time, you've increased your damage output per round by 20%.

The catch is that, in the old attribute system, there were penalties for making a hybrid character; it was a trade-off, gaining versatility at the price of major competence in either. Under the skills-only system, however, the gain from being merely 'good' in both far outstrips the cost.

Put another way, try swapping out Amadan's archery skill for skill in, say, Swords. He'd have 30 HP (only a few HP short of the main tanks), would hit only slightly less often and would be hit only slightly more often than the mainline tanks. Oh, and he'd still have the ability to use his magic spells, disintegrating things from afar, healing, teleporting, and so forth, plus alchemy. Suddenly, that extra 10% damage doesn't look nearly so hot.

Under the skills-only system, the only limiting factor is XP. Considering how skills start hitting a severe case of diminishing returns as they go up, hybrid characters become practical. The problem is, these same hybrid characters can go on to outclass straight specialists, simply because they have a lot of extra firepower and/or durability.

In short, this system doesn't just avoid penalizing hybrid characters. It outright showers them in gold and happy rainbow kittens.

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I think for some future campaign I really am just going to have to bite the bullet and have everyone designate a primary combat skill that levels up at a predefined rate, if I'm serious about keeping everyone roughly equally combat-effective without implementing a full-on class system. I'm not very happy about the prospect, though.

For the record, I'm growing fond of Lazarus's zombie system. Combat skills are based off of base statistics and feats. I'd want to tweak it something fierce, but I like the way it separates the basic survival from the non-combat skills.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Nioca

With levels, you know ahead of time what you're handing out. A stat point and a predefined amount of XP. You only have to ask yourself one yes/no question: Has the party earned a level?

I guess the issue for me is that I feel guilty about saying no to that question, leading me to give out more levels than I otherwise would (to the point where Triumph actually complained that we were levelling up too fast in CoH). I don't feel guilty about giving 8 skill points instead of 12. If we really want to remove arbitrariness from the system, we should probably have some kind of fixed guideline on how fast characters should level up. I'm not sure we want to remove arbitrariness that badly, though.

Quote:

Put another way, try swapping out Amadan's archery skill for skill in, say, Swords. He'd have 30 HP (only a few HP short of the main tanks), would hit only slightly less often and would be hit only slightly more often than the mainline tanks. Oh, and he'd still have the ability to use his magic spells, disintegrating things from afar, healing, teleporting, and so forth, plus alchemy. Suddenly, that extra 10% damage doesn't look nearly so hot.

Under the skills-only system, the only limiting factor is XP. Considering how skills start hitting a severe case of diminishing returns as they go up, hybrid characters become practical. The problem is, these same hybrid characters can go on to outclass straight specialists, simply because they have a lot of extra firepower and/or durability.

In short, this system doesn't just avoid penalizing hybrid characters. It outright showers them in gold and happy rainbow kittens.

I have a different perspective. In general, being able to do one thing very well is inherently better than being able to do multiple things slightly less well. This is especially true in combat when you're limited to doing one thing at a time, and also especially true when you're a member of a party that can do those other things for you when you need them. That's why diminishing returns on skill point investment exist in the first place. (Incidentally, the skill system's diminishing returns don't work quite the way you might expect: they're actually more severe at low to medium levels than they are at high levels. But that topic deserves a whole post in itself.)

I'll admit that I do want to actively encourage a certain level of hybridisation, because I think hybrid characters are more interesting. So if a hybrid character ends up better off than a specialist, I'm fine with that.

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For the record, I'm growing fond of Lazarus's zombie system. Combat skills are based off of base statistics and feats. I'd want to tweak it something fierce, but I like the way it separates the basic survival from the non-combat skills.

Yeah, some kind of separation of combat from non-combat skills at character creation is looking increasingly necessary. I'm drafting up some thoughts to that end at the moment.

[Student of Trinity]

The RPG ideal in my mind is for every single character and NPC to be radically different, to the point where playing them doesn't even seem like playing the same game at all, and yet every character is equally fun to play. The Starcraft standard. I'd want every player to be looking wistfully over the fence at the other cool characters that they can never be, and yet to be content that, out of all the available options, they had their personal favorite. To me, this is what binds the party together: by hanging out with the other cool characters, everyone gets to experience them too, vicariously.

 

To the degree that all the characters are identical, the party is just a number.

 

Heh. This suggests a perverse campaign: Clonequest. All PCs are identical to begin with. Their names are numbers. The game mechanics should be tweaked to somehow make it very difficult for characters to become different in any way. This doesn't have to be a handicap. Perhaps the PCs are all androids, and they are allowed to instantly share any skill that is learned by any one of them. The main campaign theme, whatever the overt goal may be, is the effort to differentiate.

 

Perhaps the point is that the androids can copy skills instantly, but there is a limit to how many skill modules each android can hold. So initially everyone is the same, but when the party has learned enough that the androids are reaching their capacity limits, suddenly differentiation begins to set in, and the campaign changes dramatically. Everyone knows this will eventually happen, if they make it far enough.

 

Could be fun. But I don't have time to do anything about it myself, I don't think.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The RPG ideal in my mind is for every single character and NPC to be radically different, to the point where playing them doesn't even seem like playing the same game at all, and yet every character is equally fun to play. The Starcraft standard. I'd want every player to be looking wistfully over the fence at the other cool characters that they can never be, and yet to be content that, out of all the available options, they had their personal favorite. To me, this is what binds the party together: by hanging out with the other cool characters, everyone gets to experience them too, vicariously.

I'm the opposite; in general, I'd rather have simple and universal rules that minimise both the amount of balancing required on the designer's side and the amount of extra learning required on the player's side in order to support whatever character concept the player might want within the limits of what kinds of play the game is meant to support.

[Student of Trinity]

Arg, I can't help thinking it out. The title would be 'Tabula Rasa', and the campaign would be AimHack meets Upgrade Complete.

 

Every starting character would look like this:

 

Your unit identification logo reads: 1. [different number for each PC]

Your other surface logos are closed.

Your six motilators are functioning well.

Your sensory prow is functioning well.

Your eight hardpoints are unoccupied.

 

You have one software module installed: BasicPack.

BasicPack routines provide:

Motivation: survive

Motivation: observe

Motivation: upgrade

Facility: transfer open modules

Facility: install open modules

Facility: interpret open logos

Facility: microwave communication

Facility: basic optical perception

Facility: walking

Facility: grasping and lifting

 

Your remaining nine module banks are unoccupied.

 

The idea is that the characters are initially identical even in personality. None of them have much personality. The PCs are advanced six-legged robots, but with rather primitive intelligence. Initially all they can do is move around, look at things, and pick them up. They can read some of the barcodes ('logos') that are printed all over their environment and even on themselves, but only the 'open' ones; the 'closed' ones are currently uninterpretable.

 

If the units find additional software modules (and they will) they can install them, and copy them to any other unit with which they can communicate. They will also be able to install extra hardware on their hardpoints — if they acquire the software capabilities to do the installation.

 

Initially the units cannot interpret what they see very well. The descriptions the GM provides will be crude and possibly ambiguous. Additional modules will need to be installed for the PCs to obtain better descriptions.

 

Initially the units cannot even decide what to do very well. They have no personal desires. They have only three motivations: survive, observe, and upgrade. To have their PC perform any action, the player must explain to the GM how the action serves one of these motivations. If the explanation is too involved, the GM will disallow it as being beyond the capacity of the BasicPack module, and the action will not take place. Further modules will confer more sophisticated abilities. There will be no particular effort to make the AI upgrade process realistic (whatever that might be, anyway). Installing some modules will just magically give you useful abilities, or allow you to more closely approximate normal human reasoning and motivation.

 

The campaign begins in a closed facility which contains a number of tests and tasks, and rewards in the form of hardware and software upgrades. There is no backstory available initially. The PCs have just booted up, and have no knowledge of where they are or why they are there, and know nothing about the world.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

n general, I'd rather have simple and universal rules that minimise both the amount of balancing required on the designer's side and the amount of extra learning required on the player's side in order to support whatever character concept the player might want within the limits of what kinds of play the game is meant to support.

I'd like this, too, though. My ideal would somehow achieve very diverse strategies, equally fun if not necessarily equally effective, within a single set of simple rules. So the simple, single set of rules has to have incentive to specialize baked in. I'm not saying it's an attainable ideal, but it's not self-contradictory in principle. I believe there must be many different ways of playing Go, for instance.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I'd like this, too, though. My ideal would somehow achieve very diverse strategies, equally fun if not necessarily equally effective, within a single set of simple rules. I'm not saying it's an attainable ideal, but it's not self-contradictory in principle. I believe there must be many different ways of playing Go, for instance.

Well, making strategies available is one thing. Apportioning them to characters in such a way that everybody remains useful at all times is another.

[Alorael at Large]

SoT, while your idea is very different, I think it might run into very quick problems as a campaign. Having no character motivation, no character personality, no character individuality, and very little in the way of description is a good way to lose players quickly. I think you need a little bit more to start off with.

 

Make the characters a squad of attack drones dropped into enemy territory and give them good perception and interpretation of what the military deems necessary. Add motivations to destroy enemies and enemy production. And then see what happens with free-willed, self-modifying robots running loose.

 

Or give them a mystery. They worked in some sort of automated industrial capacity, but something has broken down. They're not getting material shipments, have not received instructions in too long, or have suffered damage that requires repairs they can't perform. They're the robots who, through modification or mutation, have acquired the intellect required to face the unusual and unforeseeable challenges of non-industrial life.

 

—Alorael, who really thinks a key balancing point here is giving robots enough intellect and interest to keep players invested. And unless you think you can keep a game running on very basic dramatic irony, the things the robots can't understand have to be things the players also can't understand, and not just because the descriptions are artificially obtuse. Finally, he thinks this is no longer AIMhack material and might need to be spun off in a new thread if it's going to continue.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Technically not a trap

Finally, he thinks this is no longer AIMhack material and might need to be spun off in a new thread if it's going to continue.

I'm going to agree with this. We're at risk of distracting ourselves from an ongoing discussion with practical consequences for how AIMhack is run right now.

[Actaeon]

I would make the thread right now if I had any business doing so. Some of the ideas pitched by SOT are food for thought as a fairly experienced traditional DM. AIMhack itself is novel and engaging. It may be that, someday, the Spiderweb Software forums will be known as a community which pushed the boundaries of the pen-and-paper RPG and brought it into a new and exciting age. Heaven knows Wizards of the Coast isn't doing it.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Nioca

With levels, you know ahead of time what you're handing out. A stat point and a predefined amount of XP. You only have to ask yourself one yes/no question: Has the party earned a level?

I guess the issue for me is that I feel guilty about saying no to that question, leading me to give out more levels than I otherwise would (to the point where Triumph actually complained that we were levelling up too fast in CoH). I don't feel guilty about giving 8 skill points instead of 12. If we really want to remove arbitrariness from the system, we should probably have some kind of fixed guideline on how fast characters should level up. I'm not sure we want to remove arbitrariness that badly, though.

True, and I know I can feel a bit guilty about not handing out a level at times. Personally, I also wind up feeling guilty when giving them TOO much power or leveling too often, because it removes that nice sense of achievement that comes with a new level.

Regarding arbitrariness, I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing to have things a bit arbitrary. I just think it's too hard to try and keep a decent and balanced progression when you're handing out numbers strictly based on how The DM thinks the party is doing.

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Put another way, try swapping out Amadan's archery skill for skill in, say, Swords. He'd have 30 HP (only a few HP short of the main tanks), would hit only slightly less often and would be hit only slightly more often than the mainline tanks. Oh, and he'd still have the ability to use his magic spells, disintegrating things from afar, healing, teleporting, and so forth, plus alchemy. Suddenly, that extra 10% damage doesn't look nearly so hot.

Under the skills-only system, the only limiting factor is XP. Considering how skills start hitting a severe case of diminishing returns as they go up, hybrid characters become practical. The problem is, these same hybrid characters can go on to outclass straight specialists, simply because they have a lot of extra firepower and/or durability.

In short, this system doesn't just avoid penalizing hybrid characters. It outright showers them in gold and happy rainbow kittens.

I have a different perspective. In general, being able to do one thing very well is inherently better than being able to do multiple things slightly less well. This is especially true in combat when you're limited to doing one thing at a time, and also especially true when you're a member of a party that can do those other things for you when you need them.

You're theoretically correct. In practice, however, versatility is a lot more powerful than you give it credit for. Breaking it down:

In general, being able to do one thing very well is inherently better than being able to do multiple things slightly less well.
In a straight fight, sure. A specialized swordsman is likely to win against a hybrid swordsman. However, a hybrid swordsman simply going sword-to-sword with a superior opponent misses the point of why he's a hybrid swordsman in the first place. He's got an arsenal of magic at his command, after all, and a specialized swordsman's better skill means exactly nothing if...
-all his attacks come back on him (Abjuration's Ruby Armor)
-he's entangled and ensnared (Conjuration's entangling spell)
-the hybrid is getting an foresight-driven edge (Divination)
-he can't even see the hybrid, or has been mentally compromised (Enchantment's Shrewd Disappearance and Agony Seed, respectively)
-simply being near the hybrid inflicts damage (Evocation's Unconquered Sun)
-the hybrid can teleport away whenever he gets close (Transmutation's Hunter's Jump)
-he gets hit with DoT damage and debuffs before he can even close (Vitaemancy's Sanguine Corruption)

This is especially true in combat when you're limited to doing one thing at a time...
While you can obviously do only one thing at a time (usually), having a wide array of options available can make the difference between a wounded character and a dead one. Let's look at Amadan again. If he was a dedicated archer, he'd have better accuracy and, by extension, better damage output (though hitting things hasn't actually been an issue thusfar anyway ). He'd also be completely screwed whenever something came along which arrows were impractical against (something incorporeal or with high Physical DR). As it is, he instead has five different avenues of attack (Archery, Fire, Disintegration, Alchemy, Melee), which enables him to adapt to different challenges easier than a specialized character ever could. Which has kinda come in handy, seeing as hitting a wasp-sized target with arrows is somewhat impractical.

...and also especially true when you're a member of a party that can do those other things for you when you need them.
Again, sound in theory, not so sound in practice. Having a party where no one else can cover the others' stations turns it into a party of lynchpins; if a vital role goes down and there's no one else to cover that role, things can go downhill fast (wink wink nudge nudge, Z2 "FA's a dumpskill" Party ). Redundancy across vital roles is a good thing.

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That's why diminishing returns on skill point investment exist in the first place. (Incidentally, the skill system's diminishing returns don't work quite the way you might expect: they're actually more severe at low to medium levels than they are at high levels. But that topic deserves a whole post in itself.)

That's a post I'd really like to see.

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I'll admit that I do want to actively encourage a certain level of hybridisation, because I think hybrid characters are more interesting.

Preaching to the choir here; My first character was a battlemage, and the only specialized character I've had was Mal Travers, a focused swordsman. I definitely think the hybrids are more interesting. It's just...

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So if a hybrid character ends up better off than a specialist, I'm fine with that.

...that I think there should be a trade-off for the versatility provided. I'm of the opinion that a hybrid character should balance with a specialized character, rather than completely upstaging them.

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For the record, I'm growing fond of Lazarus's zombie system. Combat skills are based off of base statistics and feats. I'd want to tweak it something fierce, but I like the way it separates the basic survival from the non-combat skills.

Yeah, some kind of separation of combat from non-combat skills at character creation is looking increasingly necessary. I'm drafting up some thoughts to that end at the moment.

Really, the problem is that comparing combat to skill challenges is like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, it can be done, but it's better to just separate the apples and oranges and enjoy them both for what they are.

No, I don't know where I was going with that metaphor either.

[Dintiradan]

Characters and Expectations:

 

Don't know if you're talking about characters or the party going off the rails, or characters changing unexpectedly during the course of the campaign. The former case is pretty much unavoidable, unless you want to deny your PCs agency (pretty curious how far we've gone off the rails in ATCT). As for the latter case: In the impossibly ideal scenario, the GM and players are accomplished at improv, and adapt seamlessly. In the slightly less ideal case, any major changes in the way a character is played should be made known to the GM, and possibly the players as well. Yes, this might break the suspension of disbelief, but having a character change radically does so as well.

 

Attributes and Skills:

 

For the most part, I don't miss the primary attributes at all. Most gameplay works seamlessly without them. That's fine, the simpler the better, especially for AIMhack. The way secondary characteristics are derived is a bit wonky, yes. And we get quite a spread of Hit Points depending on the build. I can see a high level mage in this system starting to invest in Melee just to get more HP. Having a base amount of hit points being determined by some fraction of total invested skill points might work.

 

Transparency:

 

While I think that AIMhack's opaque mechanics are a plus, both for teaching purposes and for putting more focus on roleplay, I still would like an SRD, or something like it, accessible somewhere. As Nioca said, this would be less for players and more for GMs. I'm sure everyone who's GMed a game has been e-mailing each other about stuff, but some kind of central document (or documents, as the system is constantly changing) would be nice. On the other hand, writing out such documents would take a fair amount of time.

 

Transparency is still nice for players; it helps avoid any surprises. I don't want to find out that Weimin's been dealing d6 damage while Creidne's been dealing d8 because he uses a small sword and she uses a longsword (I know this isn't how damage is calculated in ATCT; just using that as an example).

 

Character Diversity:

 

The situation in combat and out of combat is different. In combat, it's all about tempo; balance is maintained because everyone's able to do only one thing (this is why Haste in D&D 3.0 was utterly, utterly broken). Speaking of D&D, I remember being shocked by the Mystic Theruge. A prestige class that advances both your arcane and divine spellcasting level? That's like getting two for one levelups! But then you realize that, in combat, you're three levels weaker than everyone else. And those static bonuses really do make a difference.

 

In non-combat, non-turn-based situations, it's a different story. You're still weaker than specialists, but your versatility begins to pay off. Especially for magic users: magic is a bit of a weird thing in AIMhack (and other RPGs). It feels like you're trading skill points for a set of perks. Take Amadan: he can train in Archery, and each point gives him static bonuses whenever he fires a bow. Any technique he picks up just deals with him getting the pointy end of an arrow into something else. On the other hand, through his spells he can do stuff like teleport across rivers, or control fires, or turn things to stone. I don't think this is a big flaw, and it's not one limited to AIMhack. I certainly wouldn't want AIMhack mages being limited to direct damage spells.

 

I have noticed that, with ATCT at least, non-mage characters are a bit less useful overall compared to mages. Linear fighters vs. quadratic mages and all that, again, this isn't just an AIMhack problem. Not giving Weimin any points in Magic was a stylistic decision, but from a power gamer's perspective, would he be more useful if he was part mage? It's also possible that he's just not using the skills he is trained in. This is, of course, due to our decision as players as well. Had we gone on with Operation Blow Stuff Up, I'm sure Weimin's Stealth and Artifice would have come in handy more often. As it is, he's still getting good mileage from Composure. Just want to reiterate: this isn't something that's affecting my enjoyment, but from a powergaming perspective, mages do have the upper hand, at least by a small amount. Is this a problem we want to try to solve, or even one that needs solving?

 

Levelling Method:

 

One small benefit of levelling up with a fixed skill point increase each time is that you are able to plan ahead. Say you just get 6 shiny new points to allocate. You could invest all those into your secondary skill, bringing it from 5 to 6. But you've also got your primary skill at 9, and want to bump it to 10. You need to increase both, and you're not sure if the next level-up will give you any more than 6. So you bank your 6 points. Next level-up, you get 10 points. The levelling system could be changed depending on whether we want to encourage or discourage planning ahead.

 

Pseudo-Class Based Characters:

 

Just having everyone designate a primary skill is probably the simplest way (so long as hybrid characters are still possible). The other alternative is to split combat skills and non-combat skills into different 'pools', and award points to both for each level up.

 

Level-Up Latency:

 

Guilty as charged.

 

Spiderweb and AIMhack going into the annals of roleplaying history:

 

Prooooobably not.

 

Slightly Off Topic:

 

Attended a talk on PaSSAGE, dealing with this paper. CRPGs were the focus, but the question of how to determine perceived agency is still sorta relevant.

 

EDIT: Whoops, that was misleading. s/Frequency/Latency/

[BJ Back From the Beyond]

Originally Posted By: Nioca

I'm of the opinion that a hybrid character should balance with a specialized character, rather than completely upstaging them.

I agree with Nioca on this. There really should be a place for both specialist and hybrid characters. In my opinion, both are representative of different player types, with the specialist characters appealing to power-gamers, who want to be able to tackle specific problems with overwhelming force (either combat or non-combat), and hybrids appealing to problem-solvers, who want to be able to apply a variety of skills to tackle various problems (I'm a bit of both myself). When you look at it that way, the question really becomes "what types of players do you want to attract?" In AIMHack, I think the answer has consistently been "as many as possible." This means attracting both power-gamers and problem-solvers with the promise that their specialist and hybrid characters will be both fun and practical. So, I guess that brings us back to the original problem: specialists and hybrids do not balance in the current system as well as they should.
As for a solution to this, I'm pretty much lost.

(Well that was a circular post, and I probably have no idea what I'm talking about )

[BJ Back From the Beyond]

(New post because I'm addressing a new subject)

 

Originally Posted By: Dintiradin

I can see a high level mage in [the AtCT] system starting to invest in Melee just to get more HP.

AtCT's HP system does seem to punish pure magic casters simply for not taking any melee or missile skills. I know that's a problem I've run into with Lucia. The decision to not train her in any melee or missile skills has pretty much caused her to be left behind by the rest of the party in the HP department. For instance, compare Lucia with Lephista, the character with the second lowest HP total in the group. Lephista has 4 ranks in a melee skill and 4 in athletics giving her 22 HP. In order for Lucia to get to 22 HP without branching out from her specialization in magic, she would have to get her athletics skill up to 12. That's a major investment in a skill that pretty much just slightly increases one's HP and makes it easier to run away from enemies.

 

Originally Posted By: Dintiradin

I have noticed that, with ATCT at least, non-mage characters are a bit less useful overall compared to mages.

That may actually be something specific to AtCT. There are two points here. The first is the type of enemies the party has been facing. With the exception of two fights, the enemies have all been swarms of very small targets; not exactly something that is easily countered by swinging a sword. In the two fights that have been against larger, individual enemies the two tanks in the party have been invaluable (well, less so in the barn fight, but still). The second point is that two of the casters in the party have higher skills in their magic than either of the fighters do in their melee, and it's been that way pretty much through the campaign. Granted, the difference isn't very large, but it's there.

 

Originally Posted By: Dintiradin

One small benefit of levelling up with a fixed skill point increase each time is that you are able to plan ahead. Say you just get 6 shiny new points to allocate. You could invest all those into your secondary skill, bringing it from 5 to 6. But you've also got your primary skill at 9, and want to bump it to 10. You need to increase both, and you're not sure if the next level-up will give you any more than 6. So you bank your 6 points. Next level-up, you get 10 points. The levelling system could be changed depending on whether we want to encourage or discourage planning ahead.

Personally, I like being able to plan the growth of my characters ahead of time. With previous campaigns, it has usually been clear roughly how many points one will get upon leveling up, and one can plan for that in advance. This system has the benefit of making the player look forward to their next level up. Do not discount the enjoyment derived from simply anticipating something and being able to plan around it. This is one reason I think level based systems are so popular; they're fun.

With the AtCT 'skill point' system, it's much harder to plan what skills will be increased ahead of time. We don't know how many skill points we're going to get, so there's no way we can really plan ahead without laying down multiple contingency plans (something I've taken to doing). That just isn't as much fun as knowing how you can make your character grow ahead of time.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Nioca

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That's why diminishing returns on skill point investment exist in the first place. (Incidentally, the skill system's diminishing returns don't work quite the way you might expect: they're actually more severe at low to medium levels than they are at high levels. But that topic deserves a whole post in itself.)

That's a post I'd really like to see.

Okay, I've got some spare time so let's do this. I'm making this its own post because it's worth drawing attention to it.

Let's look at two different players. One of them wants to make a specialist, so she puts roughly 50% of her total skill points into a single primary combat skill at all levels. Another wants to make a hybrid, so he puts roughly 25% of his total skill points into each of two different combat skills. So we're holding the total investment in combat-related skills constant here, just looking at different strategies. (In practice, hybrids tend to invest a little more than specialists, precisely to avoid falling behind.)

Say that both of these characters start out as greenhorns with 20 skill points. The specialist has 10 skill points to put into her primary combat skill, which means she can put a 4 in it. The hybrid has 10 points to put into his two primary skills, which means a 2 in one skill, a 3 in the other and one point left over. Thanks to diminishing returns, the specialist here is only 1-2 skill ranks ahead, depending on what skill the hybrid is using this round.

Okay, now let's have them both advance to 60 skill points, meaning 30 points are allocated to combat skills. The specialist can buy up a 7 in her primary skill and have 2 points left over. The hybrid buys up 5 ranks in each of his skills, with no points left over. The specialist is now ahead by 2 skill ranks in both skills, and has more spare skill points to boot.

Now, let's see them even further into their careers, with 200 skill points, a level that the ATCT party will probably reach by the end of the campaign. The specialist can comfortably buy up a 13 in her primary combat skill, with 9 points left over. The hybrid can buy a 9 and a 10, and once again has no skill points to spare. That means that the specialist has gone from being 1-2 ranks ahead at the start to being 3-4 ranks ahead now.

As you can see, the more they level up, the further ahead the specialist pulls compared to the hybrid with the same total skill point investment. The trend is gradual, but it's there. If we wanted to change this, we'd have to make diminishing returns work according to an exponential law instead of a power law: that is, skill costs would have to double every X ranks, where X is some fixed number. Doing this would have other undesirable effects so I'm not presenting it as a particularly serious option.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Characters and Expectations:

Don't know if you're talking about characters or the party going off the rails, or characters changing unexpectedly during the course of the campaign. The former case is pretty much unavoidable, unless you want to deny your PCs agency (pretty curious how far we've gone off the rails in ATCT).

The complete and honest answer is that there aren't any rails for you to go off. I promised in the Same Page Tool at the start of the ATCT thread that I wouldn't have a campaign-spanning plan, and I've felt an obligation to stick to that promise for as long as it continues to produce functional play. All I've done is present situations and let you decide how to respond to them. ATCT doesn't end when I run out of plot to lead you through: it ends once all the situations you've decided to involve yourselves in are either resolved to everyone's satisfaction or agreed upon to be unresolvable. You haven't always responded to situations in exactly the way I expected, but I'd be a little disappointed if you had!

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For the most part, I don't miss the primary attributes at all. Most gameplay works seamlessly without them. That's fine, the simpler the better, especially for AIMhack. The way secondary characteristics are derived is a bit wonky, yes. And we get quite a spread of Hit Points depending on the build. I can see a high level mage in this system starting to invest in Melee just to get more HP. Having a base amount of hit points being determined by some fraction of total invested skill points might work.

The new hit point system in ATCT is another deliberate feature that's working more-or-less as intended, as far as I'm concerned. The Mote setting is pretty Vance-influenced, and Vancian protagonists are multi-talented guys who might know a spell or two but also know how to swing a sword. Frail spellcasters exist, but in general they don't go out on adventures. I don't want the squishy wizard archetype to be totally erased from the list of possible characters, but I don't want it to be a standard member of every party either -- and if someone does want to play a squishy wizard, I want them to actually be squishy, and reliant on protection from other party members.

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While I think that AIMhack's opaque mechanics are a plus, both for teaching purposes and for putting more focus on roleplay, I still would like an SRD, or something like it, accessible somewhere. As Nioca said, this would be less for players and more for GMs. I'm sure everyone who's GMed a game has been e-mailing each other about stuff, but some kind of central document (or documents, as the system is constantly changing) would be nice. On the other hand, writing out such documents would take a fair amount of time.

For the next campaign I run, I'll probably make a comprehensive document listing all the rules I use and put it up on my webspace. If nothing else, it'll help keep me honest.

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In non-combat, non-turn-based situations, it's a different story. You're still weaker than specialists, but your versatility begins to pay off. Especially for magic users: magic is a bit of a weird thing in AIMhack (and other RPGs). It feels like you're trading skill points for a set of perks. Take Amadan: he can train in Archery, and each point gives him static bonuses whenever he fires a bow. Any technique he picks up just deals with him getting the pointy end of an arrow into something else. On the other hand, through his spells he can do stuff like teleport across rivers, or control fires, or turn things to stone. I don't think this is a big flaw, and it's not one limited to AIMhack. I certainly wouldn't want AIMhack mages being limited to direct damage spells.

This is something that I've been thinking about and working on too. Magic in Mote is powerful and versatile, but still relatively limited compared to what people have historically expected from D&D. Part of the reason for this is the increased granularity of the AIMhack spell system at lower levels: what might be a 3rd or 4th-level spell in 3E D&D is often considered borderline epic in Mote, but there's more stuff below it to make up for that. I'd like things to stay that way and any rules I design will support that style of play.

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I have noticed that, with ATCT at least, non-mage characters are a bit less useful overall compared to mages. Linear fighters vs. quadratic mages and all that, again, this isn't just an AIMhack problem. Not giving Weimin any points in Magic was a stylistic decision, but from a power gamer's perspective, would he be more useful if he was part mage? It's also possible that he's just not using the skills he is trained in. This is, of course, due to our decision as players as well. Had we gone on with Operation Blow Stuff Up, I'm sure Weimin's Stealth and Artifice would have come in handy more often. As it is, he's still getting good mileage from Composure. Just want to reiterate: this isn't something that's affecting my enjoyment, but from a powergaming perspective, mages do have the upper hand, at least by a small amount. Is this a problem we want to try to solve, or even one that needs solving?

This isn't so much an issue of raw power as an issue of versatility. When you see a dude who's athletic, stealthy and good with a sword, you might not be surprised to see him scale a cliff while fighting off harpies, but you'd certainly be surprised to see him cause a thunderstorm to blast the harpies out of the sky before he even starts on the cliff. But when you have magic, well, who's to say what it can and can't do? You can have magic that lets you call forth lightning and float up a cliff. Keeping the list of spells that can be known at once short, as AIMhack does, is one way to keep spellcasters in check: mages can do powerful things, but each mage can only do a few particular powerful things. I'm open to other suggestions, particularly on the side of how to make non-magic-users more interesting and versatile.

Quote:

One small benefit of levelling up with a fixed skill point increase each time is that you are able to plan ahead. Say you just get 6 shiny new points to allocate. You could invest all those into your secondary skill, bringing it from 5 to 6. But you've also got your primary skill at 9, and want to bump it to 10. You need to increase both, and you're not sure if the next level-up will give you any more than 6. So you bank your 6 points. Next level-up, you get 10 points. The levelling system could be changed depending on whether we want to encourage or discourage planning ahead.

You know, this didn't even occur to me as a problem when I was doing away with levels, but as you and BJ point out it clearly has the potential to be one. Levels do have their advantages.

Quote:

Just having everyone designate a primary skill is probably the simplest way (so long as hybrid characters are still possible). The other alternative is to split combat skills and non-combat skills into different 'pools', and award points to both for each level up.

My current half-finished experiment in design involves having characters pick a primary offensive strategy, a primary survival strategy, and a skill point pool for non-combat skills that's similar to what we already use. I'll post it up here for critique once it's a little more complete.

[Nioca]

Quote:

Quote:

While I think that AIMhack's opaque mechanics are a plus, both for teaching purposes and for putting more focus on roleplay, I still would like an SRD, or something like it, accessible somewhere. As Nioca said, this would be less for players and more for GMs. I'm sure everyone who's GMed a game has been e-mailing each other about stuff, but some kind of central document (or documents, as the system is constantly changing) would be nice. On the other hand, writing out such documents would take a fair amount of time.

For the next campaign I run, I'll probably make a comprehensive document listing all the rules I use and put it up on my webspace. If nothing else, it'll help keep me honest.

Yeah, I'm probably going to make a rules sheet regarding both the base Lazarus rules of zombies AND the changes I've been making available on my site. But that's one of about 7 different Zombies-related projects going on right now.

-----

Switching gears here, one thing I've tried out and am liking thusfar is doing DM rolls right in the main chat window. It hasn't hampered player enjoyment at all as far as I can tell, has actually ramped up tension a few times since I started doing it, and suppresses the urge to pull punches or fudge die rolls for the player's benefit. Plus, if you've got the roll command memorized, it's a lot faster and easier than switching back and forth between the AIM windows, character sheets, and die roller ad nauseum.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Nioca

Switching gears here, one thing I've tried out and am liking thusfar is doing DM rolls right in the main chat window. It hasn't hampered player enjoyment at all as far as I can tell, has actually ramped up tension a few times since I started doing it, and suppresses the urge to pull punches or fudge die rolls for the player's benefit. Plus, if you've got the roll command memorized, it's a lot faster and easier than switching back and forth between the AIM windows, character sheets, and die roller ad nauseum.

Hahaha, I noticed you doing this yesterday. I don't think it's really switching gears at all to bring it up: it's another technique to keep ourselves honest about the rules we're using. I'd considered doing the same thing but was worried about conversation being swamped in a tide of rolls, but now I'm seriously considering it again. If nothing else, it gives players feedback that yes, I'm processing stuff during my turn.

Maybe I'll try it out for the next ATCT and see how it goes. If there's combat next session, that is.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Nioca

Switching gears here, one thing I've tried out and am liking thusfar is doing DM rolls right in the main chat window.

Maybe I'll try it out for the next ATCT and see how it goes. If there's combat next session, that is.

If I may offer a suggestion: Keep a dice roller on hand in case you do need to make a roll in private (like, say, an enemy or NPC making a stealth roll). This also helps if your players want to make a roll without the rest of the group knowing (though this usually doesn't come up too often).

[Sudanna]

Or just use real dice?

[Dintiradan]

I've always assumed the GMs rolled actual dice, but I know that gaming dice can be hard to acquire if you don't live in a city.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

I've always assumed the GMs rolled actual dice, but I know that gaming dice can be hard to acquire if you don't live in a city.

my desk is too small and too messy for real dice

[BJ Back From the Beyond]

5 seconds of searching turned up this little gem.

[keira]

I'm just linking this. It came up in the post-session dialogue that it would be nice to have a wiki for AimHack-related stuff.

 

You have to register, because I like to think that the stupid little recapcha thing makes it spamproof and flawless. as for content right now there is none, i've started to get templates and crap set up, and that's going okay. I'll try to get some more on that done tomorrow, it'll be a good escape from the "happy" family holiday time.

 

seriously the only reason thanksgiving doesn't suck as much as other holidays is because i'm too doped up on tryptophan to care about being alone.

 

anyway since i'm only in zombies atm i'm going to leave 'real' content to the people who are in those campaigns or whatever.

 

oh and you can upload crap please don't feel the need to upload porn or goatse or something because that's grody.

 

oh yeah and i know the logo sucks i'll fix it sometime. but for now sleep.

[keira]

Okay so today all the Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving by eating a lot. Given that us Americans like eating, we sometimes forget that it's Thanksgiving. So anyway, I'm just here to thank all the DMs for putting these campaigns together, the players for playing in them, and everyone else. The whole AIMhack system is amazing thanks to the remarkable efforts put forth by the community. Also, thank you to the not-AIMhack people for tolerating having every other thread in General be about it, the Admins for letting it be talked about, and Jeff for creating SW and indirectly allowing us all to come together.

[Nioca]

Mmmm... Thankfulness.

 

Well, I'd like to thank all the DMs as well for putting campaigns together. I'd like to thank Ephesos, for letting me sub for Cumulo's back when I didn't even know what a D20 was. I'd like to thank the players of my previous campaigns for taking a chance on someone who's idea of taking baby steps was starting a party of six and kicking off a plot regarding necromancy, floating fortresses, and completely forgetting what the plot's actually about.

 

I'd like to thank my current players (Excalibur, B.J. Earles, Dantius, Rowen, Nalyd, Sylae) for letting me torment their characters. The zombies would be hungry without your contributions! On that note, I'd also like to thank Lazarus, who started the ZombieHack variant and did the original Zombies! campaign (even though it's stalled).

 

I'd like to thank Lilith, who's putting up with Amadan (who currently has a character sheet that's longer than the other four characters put together). I'd also like to thank Lilith again, for putting up with me perpetually telling her that she's doing it wrong.

 

(You know what, let's broaden that out into general thankfulness that you all put up with my crap, shall we? )

 

I'd like to thank Sylae for starting the Wiki. I'd like to thank Ephesos for kicking off the whole AIMHack thing. I'd like to thank Lilith (again) for taking over some responsibility for handling the Spell Compendium. And I'd like to thank my two cats for occasionally acting as my fuzzy armrest co-pilots when a session starts.

 

Also I'd like to thank ham, for being a delicious and far superior alternative to a thanksgiving turkey.

 

EDIT: OH! OH! Almost forgot! I'd also like to thank all the spectators who sub for players that go missing/AWOL. You guys are real life-savers!

[Nioca]

*bup*

 

For all those interested, the Spell Compendium has now been ported over to Sylae's AIMHack Wiki. Martial Techniques now have their own (much smaller) compendium as well. I'm aware that there are spells missing, but I was more concerned with getting the current compendium ported over and getting the CreepingHack Quad-School compendium up.

 

Also, for all those interested, I just added 121,324 bytes worth of text and, on an related note, am not touching the compendium for a week. If you want to see a bunch of bad jokes and puns most people couldn't care less about that are a result of me going mad from the insanity, check out the Recent Changes page on the wiki.

[keira]

Okay, so here's kind of a dumb question, what's the proper capitalization for this? I've been using AIMhack, is it actually AIMHack? I've seen both ways used, about equally.

 

I feel like this is would be a poll question, but I don't think it's worth starting Metathread Number Three over...

[Lilith]

hey guys i drafted up a very incomplete set of new core rules for aimhack. i'm trying to fix some the mechanical issues with present versions of the game, most particularly the fact that specialist/generalist balance breaks down at higher levels and the requirement to invest in unused stats or skills just to maintain reasonable survivability

 

it still needs some work though: some parts may need a rewrite for clarity and there's some stuff i haven't written up yet. still i think it's a good start. decide for yourself

 

Click to reveal..

The game's core resolution mechanic is to roll 1d20 (a single twenty-sided die), applying appropriate bonuses and penalties according to the circumstances. A roll is called for whenever a character attempts to do something with a non-negligible chance of failure, and failure would have important results. If the result of the modified d20 roll meets or exceeds a target number (set based on the difficulty of the action), the character's action succeeds in its stated intent; if it exceeds the target number by 5 or more, it is a particularly good success; if it is less than the target number, the action fails in some important way.

 

If the result of your roll, including all stamina bonuses (see below) but excluding other bonuses, equals or exceeds 20, the action is treated as a critical success: it has the best plausible outcome under the circumstances, and some unexpected coincidence that works in your favour may occur. If the result of your basic d20 roll, excluding all bonuses and penalties, is exactly 1, the action is a critical failure: it has the worst plausible outcome, and some unexpected coincidence that works against you may occur.

 

All characters have 10 stamina points. You may spend stamina points on any roll: for every stamina point you spend, you may add an extra six-sided die (1d6) to your d20 roll. Expended stamina is recovered gradually with rest.

 

***

 

In combat, you hit equal-level targets on a 10 if no other bonuses or penalties apply. +1 to hit for every level a target is lower than you; -1 to hit for every two levels a target is above you.

 

***

 

Combat Strategy:

Assault: Single-target attacks that inflict damage.

Skirmish: Multiple-target attacks that inflict damage. (needs a better name)

Control: Combat abilities that don't inflict damage but weaken or disable enemies.

Support: Combat abilities that don't damage or weaken enemies, but heal or boost allies, or alter the battlefield in ways that benefit the party.

 

Pick a primary and secondary Combat Strategy. You gain +2 to rolls on your primary strategy and +1 to rolls on your secondary strategy.

 

***

 

Offensive Specialisation:

 

Fortitude: Poisons, diseases and attacks that involve grabbing, pushing or throwing an opponent off balance.

Reflex: Most weapon and projectile attacks, whether physical or elemental.

Will: Curses and mind-affecting attacks.

 

Gain +2 to a single attack type, or +1 to each of two attack types.

 

***

 

Survival Strategy:

 

Balanced: You survive by staying out of range of the enemy when you can, parrying or dodging attacks when you can't, and enduring hits when you have to. You begin with 16 HP and gain 4 HP per level. You receive a +1 bonus to all defences, and may have up to 2 ranged combat abilities.

Endurance: You're uncommonly tough and physically fit, allowing you to take many hits and still remain standing. You begin with 20 HP and gain 5 HP per level, but have no other special defensive abilities.

Evasion: You fight on the front lines, but survive by avoiding attacks rather than enduring them. You begin with only 12 HP and gain 3 HP per level, but gain +2 to all defences, and the bonuses from your Defensive Specialisation (see below) are doubled. You never provoke attacks of opportunity.

Ranged: You stay away from the thick of battle, trying not to let the enemy get close enough to hit you in the first place. You begin with only 12 HP and gain 3 HP per level, but may take as many ranged combat abilities as you want.

 

***

 

Defensive Specialisation: Fort/Ref/Will as above. Gain +2 to a single defence or +1 to each of two defences. Remember, if your Survival Strategy is Evasion, these bonuses are doubled.

 

***

 

No matter what else they can do, all player characters have four basic actions available to them. They can try to grapple with an enemy (Fortitude/Control, immobilises target), attack with a weapon or their fists (Reflex/Assault, inflicts damage), taunt, bluff or intimidate opponents (Will/Control, lowers enemy attack or defence, ranged), or stabilise a wounded ally's condition (Support, prevents Stamina loss in an incapacitated ally and may bring them back into the fight with 1 HP).

 

In addition, you can choose six combat abilities, which are spells or battle techniques that your character has specialised in. Each ability falls under one of the four Combat Strategies, and for all strategies except Support, each ability also targets one of the three defences. If you're not sure what Combat Strategy a skill should fall under, use the first applicable strategy.

 

***

 

Non-Combat Skills: Your character is multitalented, and can do things besides fighting. At level 1, you have 20 skill points to allocate to non-combat skills. Increasing the value of a skill by 1 costs a number of skill points equal to the skill's new value: 1 point to raise it from 0 to 1, 2 points to raise it from 1 to 2, and so on. This means that the total cost of raising a skill to a value of x is equal to (x^2+x)/2.

 

The value of a skill is added to your d20 roll whenever you attempt to do something relevant to that skill. You have the option to "take 10" on a non-combat skill roll: when not under time pressure or other stress, you may choose to accept a result of 10 plus or minus applicable modifiers instead of rolling. If you have a value of 0 in a skill, you are considered untrained: you receive a -2 penalty to your roll, and cannot take 10 under any circumstances.

 

Every time you level up, you gain a number of skill points equal to 6 plus twice your new level (10 points at level 2, 12 points at level 3, etc.) If you're starting a character at higher than level 1, the number of skill points you should have at level x is equal to x^2+7x+12.

 

Incidentally, if for some reason you ever want to make exceptionally unskilled characters, the above formula extends neatly back into levels below 1: a level 0 character will have 12 skill points, a level -1 character will have 6, a level -2 character will have 2 and a level -3 character will have 0.

 

No skill may ever exceed your level plus 3.

 

***

 

Levelling Up and Retraining

 

When you gain a level, you gain HP and skill points as described above. If you wish, you may also do up to two of the following, or do one of the following twice:

 

* Exchange your primary and secondary combat strategy.

* Change your secondary combat strategy to a different one.

* Reallocate one point of Offensive Specialisation to a different defence.

* Reallocate one point of Defensive Specialisation to a different defence (two points, if your Survival Strategy is Evasion).

* Change your Survival Strategy to Balanced, or change it from Balanced to any other strategy. Your maximum HP is recalculated as if you had used the new Survival Strategy since level 1.

* Exchange one of your current combat abilities for a new one.

* Reduce a non-combat skill by 1 and regain the skill points you spent on it, which you may immediately spend on other skills

 

When you level up, the difference between your current and maximum HP is held constant, even if you change your Survival Strategy. For example, if you were at 10/12 HP with a Survival Strategy of Evasion at level 1, and you change to a Balanced strategy when you level up, you will begin Level 2 with 18/20 HP -- 2 less than your maximum HP. If changing your Survival Strategy would reduce your current HP to 0 or less, you cannot do so.

[Nioca]

Um... that seems like an awful lot of work and added complication just for the sake of avoiding base attributes.

[Dantius]

Mmmmmmmmm... I think not.

 

Look, the purpose of any RPG rules set is to keep things a.) simple and b.) balanced. Since it's pretty clear that not even 3.5 in its arcane complexity could make things perfectly balanced, then it seems foolish to switch out the simplicity of Eph's system for something vastly more complex (cf. your quadratic equation f(L)= x^2+7x+12 (that you didn't even properly declare variables for )). What your system does is replace three attributes (STR, DEX, and INT), and three derived attributes (Spell slots, HP, and AC) with survival strategies, combat strategies, defense strategies, noncombat skills, TH level-dependent bonuses, and a whole bunch of stuff that makes no sense whatsoever.

 

I mean, jeez. I understand that it's all cool and modern to have RPG's with no attributes and no skills and "keys" instead or whatever, since you seem to insistently link to hipster rule sets like that every time someone brings up a minor and inconsequential problem with the current system that could easily be fixed within the current system. I'm just wondering what exactly is the problem with stats and attributes that makes them so bad that they must be replaced at all costs as soon as possible? Was your family killed by Thulsa DEX/STR/INT at a young age and you grew up swearing revenge against him? Pretty much every successful DnD based gaming system, whether pen-and-paper or CRPG (think KOTOR or NWN) uses attributes and skills, and they seem to be doing fine, so I really thng that you're just posting solutions in search of a problem here.

 

tl;dr:

 

Click to reveal..

[Sudanna]

Quote:

The value of a skill is added to your d20 roll whenever you attempt to do something relevant to that skill. You have the option to "take 10" on a non-combat skill roll: when not under time pressure or other stress, you may choose to accept a result of 10 plus or minus applicable modifiers instead of rolling. If you have a value of 0 in a skill, you are considered untrained: you.

Typo?

Originally Posted By: Nioca

Um... that seems like an awful lot of work and added complication just for the sake of avoiding base attributes.

Base attributes do not help remove the problems of

Quote:

specialist/generalist balance breaks down at higher levels and the requirement to invest in unused stats or skills just to maintain reasonable survivability

[Sarachim]

We've had this conversation so many times that I'm kind of shocked that this part still needs to be said, but here it goes: the problem with STR/DEX/INT (and with having combat and noncombat skills overlap) is that there's an inevitable trade-off between making a fun, interesting, unique generalist and an effective specialist.

 

The problem becomes especially acute in high-level campaigns like ATCT- even without stats, there's a pretty clear difference in combat performance between, say, Lucia and Amadan. If we take it as a design principle that, if all characters spend an equal amount of time fighting, they ought to be about equally good at it, then something needs to change.

 

Of course, all of the above presumes that having a character who's fun but kinda useless is a bigger problem than having a system whose complexity is possibly off-putting to people who don't have the meaty left-brain of an engineer. That's a question of taste, and not really worth arguing over.

[Triumph]

Ditto what the others have said. I am willing for AIMHack to lack a little in balance in order to preserve simplicity and flexibility. What you've drawn up is interesting stuff, to be sure...but I think maybe it's no longer AIMHack. If you want to develop your own system, rock on! Just recognize it as such.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Sarachim

We've had this conversation so many times that I'm kind of shocked that this part still needs to be said, but here it goes: the problem with STR/DEX/INT (and with having combat and noncombat skills overlap) is that there's an inevitable trade-off between making a fun, interesting, unique generalist and an effective specialist.

False dilemma, Sarachim. A generalist is not necessarily fun, unique, or interesting. Likewise, a specialist is not necessarily boring or bland, either.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief

Originally Posted By: Nioca

Um... that seems like an awful lot of work and added complication just for the sake of avoiding base attributes.

Base attributes do not help remove the problems of

Quote:

specialist/generalist balance breaks down at higher levels and the requirement to invest in unused stats or skills just to maintain reasonable survivability

This has less to do with base attributes, and more to do with the fact that survival and weapons skills are lumped in with non-combat skills. The way the current skill system works (Either Classic AIMHack OR CreepingHack), there's just not a whole lot of ways to properly balance between someone who's heavily investing in a single martial skill and those that aren't (there's also not a whole lot of ways to balance between people who focus on martial abilities, and those that focus on NC-Skills).

(I'll leave the flexibility versus raw numbers argument to a later debate.)