Quote from: tenbones;730816So basically, you're offended that FFG is making money by using this mechanic (which as others have said here, and I myself as an extreme skeptic have found very useful and worthwhile - anecdotally) as opposed to other systems that essentially do the same thing with "normal" contrivances?

Edit: not trying to be snarky either.

No. My argument has been in my posts. It is convoluted in comparison and poor to cannibalize. The proprietary profiteering part is incidental, though still annoying.

Quote from: Endless Flight;730931Aren't cards just a "gimmick" too?

Sure, if pencils, papers, and numbers are just gimmicks as well.

A regular deck of cards and regular d6s are not proprietary products. Nor are they difficult to find or hobby-isolated products.

Further, that is an incidental beef with such products, as has been explained repeatedly in my posts. (Which I must now assume have not been read at all, let alone thoroughly.)

The proprietary dice for WHFRP 3rd and EoE are dumb cash grabs. I'd never run or play in a game where we have to stop every roll and spend 5 mins trying to scry the results from a bunch of symbols. Just don't like it.

I don't want or need multi-axes results. RPGs have worked just fine for me for the last 30+ years using just a pass/fail mechanic with using the points away from the goal number to determine degree of success if needed.

That said, I won't touch another RPG from FFG with a thousand foot pole anyway. They are a company all about putting out fancy-looking, huge, expensive tomes of rules that are over-complicated and spread the info I need throughout dozens of supplements just to rake in the money. Not at all what I want these days - if I can't get a complete-enough game in one or two books, I'm just not interested.

Star Wars d6 was far from perfect, but I can still spend $30 or so to buy both the core rules and the sourcebook and get all the rules I need in just a couple hundred pages. I don't want / need rules that require a nearly 500 page core book for $60 and then have all kinds of things I want spread out over a dozen more supplements, each a costly hardcover. Even if I didn't mind spending the money or overly-complicated rules, one can only carry so many books around.

Quote from: Opaopajr;730947No. My argument has been in my posts. It is convoluted in comparison and poor to cannibalize. The proprietary profiteering part is incidental, though still annoying.

Your argument is hidden behind a wall of technical terms.

Quote from: jgants;730962The proprietary dice for WHFRP 3rd and EoE are dumb cash grabs. I'd never run or play in a game where we have to stop every roll and spend 5 mins trying to scry the results from a bunch of symbols. Just don't like it.

I don't want or need multi-axes results. RPGs have worked just fine for me for the last 30+ years using just a pass/fail mechanic with using the points away from the goal number to determine degree of success if needed.

Or spend 5 minutes and learn the symbols?

Quote from: jgants;730962Star Wars d6 was far from perfect

WRONG

My favorite rpg, by far, and one of the best (1st edition specifically). Not perfect, yes, but damn close. At least as close as a game about laser swords and ships that make noise in space can be.

Quote from: jgants;730962I'd never run or play in a game where we have to stop every roll and spend 5 mins trying to scry the results from a bunch of symbols.

Star Wars d6 was far from perfect...

I have found that, on average, it takes me longer to determine the results from a Star Wars d6 dice roll than it does from an EotE one.

Quote from: Skywalker;730979I have found that, on average, it takes me longer to determine the results from a Star Wars d6 dice roll than it does from an EotE one.

Not all of us can be good at 1st grade addition.

Quote from: Sommerjon;730964Your argument is hidden behind a wall of technical terms.

Fair criticism. If so, then ask me to clarify if confused, as I have done so. Are you confused by convolution and cannibalize, as quoted from above?

By the way, at our table my friend gave us 15+ minutes to learn the symbols -- along with his conversions to regular polyhedron dice -- as we were receiving his pregens (with some background and motivations). It didn't help. We still had to go back to the symbol reference repeatedly.

I can play VtES CCG which is chock full of symbols, but doing so in mid-play with RPGs really gets me out of IC sync. Couldn't for the life of me get it down over a four hour game as it was like reading an unrelated foreign script after being in-character. That extra step took me out of play repeatedly and I didn't slow down play nearly as much as others.

And given that for two players this was their first RPG experience, and thus ambivalent whether to ever try it again, it was most definitely a barrier to play. They were both part of a couple and all four never came back to play. It slowed play and it confused new players. Very, very bad play experience despite your advice.

I will say FFG reprint of Netrunner is interesting. Even the first few expansions were decent. However the expansions are already taking a toll from what I hear about in tourney boards. I personally recommend the core box set of the LCG.

Quote from: Brad;730981Not all of us can be good at 1st grade addition.

Its not the complexity of the math, but the amount. Rolling and adding over 20d6 every round in starship combat takes time, even for someone who is good at math.

In comparison, rolling around around 6 dice every round and adding up as many symbols is quicker IME.

To give an example, a pretty typical attack in starship combat in WEG looks like this:

Attack:

Defence:

Damage:

Soak:


In comparison, a typical attack in starship combat in EotE looks like this:


Some people will find one easier than the other for a variety of reasons, but even with WEG's simple addition I hope you can see how some people might find the WEG version slower (and considerably so) than EotE.

Quote from: Opaopajr;730982Fair criticism. If so, then ask me to clarify if confused, as I have done so. Are you confused by convolution and cannibalize, as quoted from above?

By the way, at our table my friend gave us 15+ minutes to learn the symbols -- along with his conversions to regular polyhedron dice -- as we were receiving his pregens (with some background and motivations). It didn't help. We still had to go back to the symbol reference repeatedly.

I can play VtES CCG which is chock full of symbols, but doing so in mid-play with RPGs really gets me out of IC sync. Couldn't for the life of me get it down over a four hour game as it was like reading an unrelated foreign script after being in-character. That extra step took me out of play repeatedly and I didn't slow down play nearly as much as others.

And given that for two players this was their first RPG experience, and thus ambivalent whether to ever try it again, it was most definitely a barrier to play. They were both part of a couple and all four never came back to play. It slowed play and it confused new players. Very, very bad play experience despite your advice.

I will say FFG reprint of Netrunner is interesting. Even the first few expansions were decent. However the expansions are already taking a toll from what I hear about in tourney boards. I personally recommend the core box set of the LCG.

Funny is what it is.
6 symbols trumped you.  You hide behind stochastic function and boolean expression to make yourself sound, oh so super smarty, but can't remember 6 symbols?

Makes me wonder if it was the super difficult symbols to remember that made them not come back or listening to you bitch and whine.

Quote from: Skywalker;730992Some people will find one easier than the other for a variety of reasons, but even with WEG's simple addition I hope you can see how some people might find the WEG version slower (and considerably so) than EotE.

No, I actually can't. If you're explaining the rules to me and you say, okay, you have to roll 6 dice and beat whatever I roll on 6 dice, the amount of brain power needed to comprehend this statement is close to zero. Using funny dice with weird symbols is an order of magnitude hard to grasp initially; you actually have to invest in understanding the rules. If you're playing a roleplaying game (and not a starship combat game...I have Star Warriors for that), the GM is going to be interpreting the results, anyway. I just roll some dice and tell him a number, that's it. There's no investment that I have to make in order to fly my ship around other than roll a few 6-siders and add them up and tell the GM. He makes the interpretation, not me.

Using the system with die symbols means that, now, I have to figure out what those dice mean. OR, the GM can do that for me if I don't want to figure it out, which is what happens in d6 SW in the first place, I just don't look like a lazy dick. However, since the dice say something specific happened, the GM has become less important, and in fact, isn't interpreting a thing. He's simply matching up symbols that tell him something specific. For a wargame this is necessary, for a roleplaying game it's annoying.

So, basically, the die mechanic isn't demonstrably faster at the expense of enforcing player entitlement.

Oh please, the dice don't dictate to the GM what happened any more than a pass/fail mechanic does.

All it adds is another axis for him to use to come up with the results. (and yes, in combat there are quite a bit of set things you can spend advantage and threat on... but combat is almost always one of the most codified parts of every game.)

Quote from: Brad;731044Using funny dice with weird symbols is an order of magnitude hard to grasp initially; you actually have to invest in understanding the rules.

Yes, there is higher initial hurdle of first encountering the dice. But once that hurdle is overcome, EotE runs faster for some people. The quantity of addition in the WEG example is a magnitude higher than that in the EotE.

As for interpretation, the dice are not a set of tarot cards with strange images that need lengthy deliberation. For the most part the dice determine success/failure (along with critical success/failure), which is pretty much the same as it is under D6. You just roll some dice and tell the GM your number of successes and whether or not you criticalled and that's pretty much it. The only real distinction between the two processes is that the two results aren't necessarily linked.

The dice do also determine positive and negative side effect but it does so in exactly the same way as success/failure (you tell the GM the number of which you got), but that requires very little extra interpretation in practice as the result is as well defined in the rules as success/failure.

Quote from: Endless Flight;730931Aren't cards just a "gimmick" too?

Depends on how they are used.

In some games they essentially just do the function of a table.
In others cards and how they are used add a twist to the probabilities as cards move in and out of the draw deck. Or can be sorted out of the deck to control what happens when and where. TORG is an example of using cards in an interesting way rather than a gimmic way. Ok, its still a gimmic. But there you go.