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Author Topic: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?  (Read 7316 times)

Pat
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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #30 on: May 10, 2021, 08:20:34 PM »
Another problem with D&D is that 1st level characters can be killed by things most normal couch potatoes in real life would survive, even if seriously injured. I mean seriously, a RAT can kill a 0-level commoner in D&D with little effort. D&D doesn't handle survivability well.
It's fine for creatures that are roughly human-size or larger. But yes, for smaller critters, old school D&D has some issues. The basic problem is about 1 in 3 or 4 NPCs has 1 hp. An attack that does even 1 point of damage is a potentially fatal wound, for at least 25% of the population.

Is there a reasonable chance an animal can kill a healthy human being who is actively defending themselves? If the answer is no, the animal should do 0 damage. This applies to small dogs, squirrels, hawks, eagles, and even the fabled domestic cat. If they have attacks, it should be of the nuisance variety, not the damage variety (ordinary bats in B/X are a good example).

The problem with that approach is that it doesn't emulate damage very well because a rat could still potentially kill a healthy human being. Eventually. Specially if it's a bunch of rats gnawing at the bits or the human keels over and can't get up (or is bound). So a rat bite should do some damage (not to mention risk of disease or infection). But when the system starts out with the assumption that an average healthy human who isn't an experienced adventurer only has a single hit dice and they need to hit points, you don't have a lot of room to work with, even if you lower a tiny creature's bite to just 1hp per hit.

Even when dealing with medium or larger creature attacks it still remains an issue, because a person who rolled one single HP on their HD would still be instant-killed if they get hit with a stick. Once! With ANY hit no matter how low as long as it inflicts damage. And that's freaking absurd.

A 1hp commoner could die from a hard bitch slap from a high Strength fighter.
That's terrible design, and thinking like that is the reason the problem exists in the first place. The hit points system is not designed to reflect psychological stress in combat, like freezing. It's not designed around realistic injuries, like sprains, blood loss, and shock. It's not a good measure of disease progression or fatigue. It doesn't handle slitting someone's throat in their sleep well.

It's an abstract system designed to provide a meter between fresh and dead in combat, using granular quanta, and it does that quite well. If you want a rat slowly chewing on a bound prisoner, the hit point system and damage per attack is completely the wrong tool. Have the DM make a judgment call, perhaps roll for save, say a rat does 1 point of damage/hour, whatever seems reasonable. Just don't roll individual hits, and then roll for damage for each them. And for Zagyg's sake, don't try to use a rat slowly gnawing on someone as a justification for why small creatures need to do more than 0 damage in the standard combat system. It breaks what hit points do well, without adding anything of value.

Rats do 0 hp.

Brad

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #31 on: May 10, 2021, 08:20:58 PM »
The level treadmill and its lack of connection to fiction is one of my bigger gripes when it comes to D&D.

Well, yeah, because D&D isn’t interactive fiction, it’s a game. And games have scorecards.

Personally I like level and non-level based games, even ones like Traveller with relatively nonexistent character growth. They all offer a different gaming experience, so limiting yourself to one genre is just dumb.
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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #32 on: May 10, 2021, 08:53:59 PM »
Is a single rat a metaphor for something? I don’t ever remember a stat block for a single New York style rat. Swarms of Rats over a foot long, yes, and three foot giant rats as well, but I have never seen a singular basic bitch rat in D&D.

jhkim

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #33 on: May 10, 2021, 09:06:19 PM »
Is a single rat a metaphor for something? I don’t ever remember a stat block for a single New York style rat. Swarms of Rats over a foot long, yes, and three foot giant rats as well, but I have never seen a singular basic bitch rat in D&D.

Stats for a single rat have been around for a while, since rats are an option for familiar animal. I see stats for a single rat in 3rd ed and 5th ed Monster Manuals. I'm not sure about 2nd edition.

Kyle Aaron

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #34 on: May 10, 2021, 09:11:00 PM »
If two swordsman are in a duel and both are "good" but one is significantly better than the other, then that difference will be very important to the outcome of the duel.
These differences will be indistinguishable from chance. If my skill is 62% and yours is 65%, and we must roll d100 to hit, and d100 to parry, the variation due to the dice roll is far, far greater than the variation due to our skills. Now, if each hit did 1 hit point of damage and we each had 1,000 hit points, we could perhaps notice our skill differences over the course of the combat. But if we each have 6 hit points then no, we won't notice - and even 40% to 60% will often be missed.

So the assumptions we make about a skill system, and skills in use, also tie into the assumptions we make about results of combat. And that's tricky, because while we like to imagine skills as continuous (having many small increments), combats are discrete - you only have four possible results, you are okay, injured, injured badly, or dead. D&D resolves this by having hit points, so that combat results can be continuous, too.

But again, we must decide whether we are speaking of what is realistic, what is reasonable, or what makes a fun game. In Conflict I hope I've found the overlap in that Venn diagram, but they are nonetheless three distinct qualities, and you can have one without the other two, or two without the third.

So that's the question in game design: do you want realistic, reasonable or fun? Or some combination of the three? Commonly people who find some particular subsystem of a game to be not fun will complain it's not realistic. But they are different things. Chess is fun, but it is not realistic. The 1d6 combat resolution I suggested in the firearms thread is realistic, but would not be fun.
« Last Edit: May 10, 2021, 09:13:10 PM by Kyle Aaron »
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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #35 on: May 10, 2021, 09:13:04 PM »
I'm offended at this whole line of discussion about rats.

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #36 on: May 10, 2021, 09:16:44 PM »
Is a single rat a metaphor for something? I don’t ever remember a stat block for a single New York style rat. Swarms of Rats over a foot long, yes, and three foot giant rats as well, but I have never seen a singular basic bitch rat in D&D.

Stats for a single rat have been around for a while, since rats are an option for familiar animal. I see stats for a single rat in 3rd ed and 5th ed Monster Manuals. I'm not sure about 2nd edition.

Ahhh, well thank you for the education. I know they are either unstated as small animals or listed in swarms in the early versions (Basic and OD&D).

I agree with the sentiment that a single rat cannot, under normal circumstances, kill a PC. Anyway, thanks again!

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #37 on: May 10, 2021, 09:18:59 PM »
Is a single rat a metaphor for something? I don’t ever remember a stat block for a single New York style rat. Swarms of Rats over a foot long, yes, and three foot giant rats as well, but I have never seen a singular basic bitch rat in D&D.
They're in the AD&D1e Monster Manual 2, but they don't do damage. They have a chance of causing disease, though.

They're wimps compared to the ordinary squirrel, which does 1 point of damage. (Seriously. They have the giant black squirrel, the carnivorous flying squirrel, and the plain old ordinary squirrel. The MM2 went kind of crazy statting out mundane little animals.)

Mishihari

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #38 on: May 11, 2021, 04:26:50 AM »
If two swordsman are in a duel and both are "good" but one is significantly better than the other, then that difference will be very important to the outcome of the duel.
These differences will be indistinguishable from chance. If my skill is 62% and yours is 65%, and we must roll d100 to hit, and d100 to parry, the variation due to the dice roll is far, far greater than the variation due to our skills. Now, if each hit did 1 hit point of damage and we each had 1,000 hit points, we could perhaps notice our skill differences over the course of the combat. But if we each have 6 hit points then no, we won't notice - and even 40% to 60% will often be missed.

That is not my experience.  I'm not a swordsman, but I do have a good decade of martial arts experience.  That doesn't make me an expert or an authority, but I think it does give me some relevant insight.  I'm pretty good, and I know a lot of other people that are pretty good, some a bit better than me and some a bit worse.  The guys that are a bit better can beat me about 3 out of 4 times.  A relatively small difference in skill makes a big difference in who wins the fight.  Maybe it's because real life doesn't use dice, aside from the rare environmental factor it's pretty deterministic.

So the assumptions we make about a skill system, and skills in use, also tie into the assumptions we make about results of combat. And that's tricky, because while we like to imagine skills as continuous (having many small increments), combats are discrete - you only have four possible results, you are okay, injured, injured badly, or dead. D&D resolves this by having hit points, so that combat results can be continuous, too.

But again, we must decide whether we are speaking of what is realistic, what is reasonable, or what makes a fun game. In Conflict I hope I've found the overlap in that Venn diagram, but they are nonetheless three distinct qualities, and you can have one without the other two, or two without the third.

So that's the question in game design: do you want realistic, reasonable or fun? Or some combination of the three? Commonly people who find some particular subsystem of a game to be not fun will complain it's not realistic. But they are different things. Chess is fun, but it is not realistic. The 1d6 combat resolution I suggested in the firearms thread is realistic, but would not be fun.

Well, that is the trick isn't it?  To make the design process even more fun, everyone has their own ideas about what is realistic, reasonable, and fun.  It's absolutely impossible to please everyone.  If you've managed to get all 3 for even a moderate sized group of people, then that's impressive.

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #39 on: May 11, 2021, 07:47:30 AM »

Well, that is the trick isn't it?  To make the design process even more fun, everyone has their own ideas about what is realistic, reasonable, and fun.  It's absolutely impossible to please everyone.  If you've managed to get all 3 for even a moderate sized group of people, then that's impressive.

I think part of the trick is to get "good enough" realism that is also targeted towards the kind of fun the game is supposed to produce.  Which sounds obvious, but it is amazing how often it is ignored.  For the example, if the fun of your game is supposed to be the nervousness and excitement of combats that happen fast, then your nods to realism shouldn't be mechanics that turn combat into a slog. Instead, they should be things that make you worry and require (relatively) fast decision by the players.  In contrast, if the fun is that combat goes into "slow mo" action scenes where a lot of intricate things happen in sequence, then your nods to realism should make sure to have a good way to incorporate phased movement into the multiple actions or use a relatively short length of rounds.  Both are bad choices where the combat is more operational resources than tactics.

It's not merely that some elements of good enough realism are mutually incompatible with reasonable and fun.  It's also that some such elements are mutually exclusive with each other in a given model.

Kyle Aaron

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #40 on: May 11, 2021, 07:53:03 AM »
The guys that are a bit better can beat me about 3 out of 4 times.  A relatively small difference in skill makes a big difference in who wins the fight.  Maybe it's because real life doesn't use dice, aside from the rare environmental factor it's pretty deterministic.
Now you're saying real life is... diceless?!

What you're saying is an argument for some sort of comparative system. Roll the dice, add skill, highest wins. Given the right choice of dice range and skill range you'd get that result. It'd also depend on what each roll means, since given enough exchanges even a small difference will become obvious.

For example, we could imagine a simple d6 vs d6, with the highest roll defeating the foe, ties being resolved as "play on." let us further imagine that they add +0 to +2. Of course, the +1 or +2 could be due not just to skill, to one being on higher ground, one being armoured and the other not, one being wounded and the other not, one drunk and the other sober, and so on. For the purpose of argument let's consider it as much the same thing - you get a +1 or -1, and call it "skill difference." With d6+modifiers vs d6+modifiers, a +1 vs +0 or +12 vs +11 give the same result.

  • If neither adds anything, then A wins 15 times out of 36, ties 6 times, and B wins 15 times. Of all interactions with a result (ie excluding ties), A wins 50%.
  • If A has a +1, then we get A winning 21/36, ties 5/36, and B wins 10/36. Of all interactions with a result, A wins 68%.
  • If A has a +2, then A wins 26/36, ties 4/36, and B wins 6/36. A wins 81%.
  • A+3 means 91% victory.
  • A+4 is 97% victory.
  • A+5 and above makes victory certain, and this is also the last time B can even hope for a tie.

With comparative rolls, when the range of skill difference is equal to the range of the dice, then a single step up or down makes a big difference to the likely result.

Some skills can be rated by objective measures. How much can you do of X, Y and Z? The nature of combat skills is that we mostly rate them comparatively - did you beat the guy? So it's a bit difficult to rate abilities exactly the way it is for, I dunno, calculus or language or something.

Well, that is the trick isn't it?  To make the design process even more fun, everyone has their own ideas about what is realistic, reasonable, and fun.  It's absolutely impossible to please everyone.
Of course, because there is so much misinformation out there, especially in the form of movies. As for combat, what has been noted recently is that some "realistic" war movies are popular among those who have been to war, and some among those who haven't. Generation Kill and Hurt Locker are the two best examples. Twenty minutes into Kajaki I realised it was based on a true story, why? Because it was a bit boring, and the guys were talking shit. The fictional ones are either lighthearted gungho, or Terribly Serious And Emotional.
« Last Edit: May 11, 2021, 07:54:39 AM by Kyle Aaron »
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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #41 on: May 11, 2021, 08:07:04 AM »
If two swordsman are in a duel and both are "good" but one is significantly better than the other, then that difference will be very important to the outcome of the duel.
These differences will be indistinguishable from chance. If my skill is 62% and yours is 65%, and we must roll d100 to hit, and d100 to parry, the variation due to the dice roll is far, far greater than the variation due to our skills. Now, if each hit did 1 hit point of damage and we each had 1,000 hit points, we could perhaps notice our skill differences over the course of the combat. But if we each have 6 hit points then no, we won't notice - and even 40% to 60% will often be missed.

That is not my experience.  I'm not a swordsman, but I do have a good decade of martial arts experience.  That doesn't make me an expert or an authority, but I think it does give me some relevant insight.  I'm pretty good, and I know a lot of other people that are pretty good, some a bit better than me and some a bit worse.  The guys that are a bit better can beat me about 3 out of 4 times.  A relatively small difference in skill makes a big difference in who wins the fight.  Maybe it's because real life doesn't use dice, aside from the rare environmental factor it's pretty deterministic.

So the assumptions we make about a skill system, and skills in use, also tie into the assumptions we make about results of combat. And that's tricky, because while we like to imagine skills as continuous (having many small increments), combats are discrete - you only have four possible results, you are okay, injured, injured badly, or dead. D&D resolves this by having hit points, so that combat results can be continuous, too.

But again, we must decide whether we are speaking of what is realistic, what is reasonable, or what makes a fun game. In Conflict I hope I've found the overlap in that Venn diagram, but they are nonetheless three distinct qualities, and you can have one without the other two, or two without the third.

So that's the question in game design: do you want realistic, reasonable or fun? Or some combination of the three? Commonly people who find some particular subsystem of a game to be not fun will complain it's not realistic. But they are different things. Chess is fun, but it is not realistic. The 1d6 combat resolution I suggested in the firearms thread is realistic, but would not be fun.

Well, that is the trick isn't it?  To make the design process even more fun, everyone has their own ideas about what is realistic, reasonable, and fun.  It's absolutely impossible to please everyone.  If you've managed to get all 3 for even a moderate sized group of people, then that's impressive.

  I am an expert.  I ask you, what is the relative difference in skill level?  5 percent?  10 percent?  etc.  Real life "small" difference is not the same as statistic probabilities in my experience.  I also think the person who is coming up a bit short sparring is not always understanding (especially in striking) that a real fight is different, and one or two solid shots quickly "demote" their dance partners in a real altercation.

Kyle Aaron

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #42 on: May 11, 2021, 08:18:15 AM »
  I am an expert.
How is this assessed?

This is a serious question. Because if we have some way of assessing competence, then if we are looking for a realistic-ish skill system, we can use a similar approach, or use the real-world assessment system to guide our system design.
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VisionStorm

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #43 on: May 11, 2021, 08:27:11 AM »
Another problem with D&D is that 1st level characters can be killed by things most normal couch potatoes in real life would survive, even if seriously injured. I mean seriously, a RAT can kill a 0-level commoner in D&D with little effort. D&D doesn't handle survivability well.
It's fine for creatures that are roughly human-size or larger. But yes, for smaller critters, old school D&D has some issues. The basic problem is about 1 in 3 or 4 NPCs has 1 hp. An attack that does even 1 point of damage is a potentially fatal wound, for at least 25% of the population.

Is there a reasonable chance an animal can kill a healthy human being who is actively defending themselves? If the answer is no, the animal should do 0 damage. This applies to small dogs, squirrels, hawks, eagles, and even the fabled domestic cat. If they have attacks, it should be of the nuisance variety, not the damage variety (ordinary bats in B/X are a good example).

The problem with that approach is that it doesn't emulate damage very well because a rat could still potentially kill a healthy human being. Eventually. Specially if it's a bunch of rats gnawing at the bits or the human keels over and can't get up (or is bound). So a rat bite should do some damage (not to mention risk of disease or infection). But when the system starts out with the assumption that an average healthy human who isn't an experienced adventurer only has a single hit dice and they need to hit points, you don't have a lot of room to work with, even if you lower a tiny creature's bite to just 1hp per hit.

Even when dealing with medium or larger creature attacks it still remains an issue, because a person who rolled one single HP on their HD would still be instant-killed if they get hit with a stick. Once! With ANY hit no matter how low as long as it inflicts damage. And that's freaking absurd.

A 1hp commoner could die from a hard bitch slap from a high Strength fighter.
That's terrible design, and thinking like that is the reason the problem exists in the first place. The hit points system is not designed to reflect psychological stress in combat, like freezing. It's not designed around realistic injuries, like sprains, blood loss, and shock. It's not a good measure of disease progression or fatigue. It doesn't handle slitting someone's throat in their sleep well.

It's an abstract system designed to provide a meter between fresh and dead in combat, using granular quanta, and it does that quite well. If you want a rat slowly chewing on a bound prisoner, the hit point system and damage per attack is completely the wrong tool. Have the DM make a judgment call, perhaps roll for save, say a rat does 1 point of damage/hour, whatever seems reasonable. Just don't roll individual hits, and then roll for damage for each them. And for Zagyg's sake, don't try to use a rat slowly gnawing on someone as a justification for why small creatures need to do more than 0 damage in the standard combat system. It breaks what hit points do well, without adding anything of value.

Rats do 0 hp.

Disagree. This is all a cop out to sidestep the fact that a single rat bite can still be an excruciatingly painful and potentially serious injury, with longer lasting effects than merely being an annoyance.

It also conveniently leaves out the part of my post where I bring up a 1hp peasant being instantly killed by any hit with a stick large enough to cause damage. Not a critical hit or a hard hit to the back of the head, or whatever, but just ANY random hit that causes ANY amount of damage. A rock would have the same effect. Yet neither of these items would instantly kill anyone (even an out of shape couch potato or a child) in real life, unless the attack involved an extremely lucky hit to the head. But they can instantly kill a peasant who rolled 1hp on their single HD in traditional D&D.

But make that peasant a level 10 PC, and it suddenly becomes almost impossible to kill them with a stick or a rock, even on a critical hit to the head, David vs Goliath style.

The problem isn't small animal bites causing HP damage. The problem is that D&D SUCKS at handling damage all around.

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Re: Incremental Success Improvement, as Characters Progress in RPGs?
« Reply #44 on: May 11, 2021, 09:08:21 AM »
  I am an expert.
How is this assessed?

This is a serious question. Because if we have some way of assessing competence, then if we are looking for a realistic-ish skill system, we can use a similar approach, or use the real-world assessment system to guide our system design.
  Black belt in BJJ (training and teaching for 26 years), kickboxing  training and teaching for 28 years, 9 MMA fights, trained and cornered people for over 100 fights, took direct hand in training with and sparring a couple UFC fighters for their UFC fights. 

   If that does not qualify me as an expert in martial arts (at least when it comes to hitting, choking and joint locking),  well then let me know what would.