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Post by Merkuri on Jun 28, 2004 21:18:19 GMT -5
Here we're going to try and work out the mechanics and rules of our new system, starting from the very basics. Try to forget about other systems for now, let's start from scratch.
The basic question to answer is: How do we determine whether a character succeeds or fails at a task?
What are some of the things we need to take into consideration? We need to know how hard the task is, for one. And also how much the character knows about this task (how much training he's had, how much he's read about it, or how many times he's done it before). Anything else we need to take into account?
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jun 28, 2004 22:13:51 GMT -5
The character's innate ability to succeed. A natural born speaker will be far better at presenting a speech than a tongue-tied guy with twice the training. Innate ability should probably also influence how easy it is for the character to advance in that field.
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 1, 2004 10:03:16 GMT -5
Good idea, I forgot that one. So we need a mechanism to keep track of the character's knowledge/skill on a subject and his natural ability, and we also need a way to rank tasks on how hard they are. Should we differentiate between book knowledge and practical knowledge? A character may have read a lot about picking locks, but when he actually sits down in front of one and tries to do it he may find it's a lot harder than he thought. Perhaps having book knowledge on a subject could help characters gain practical knowledge faster, but practical knowledge is really all that matters when performing the task. Or am I making things too complicated already?
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 1, 2004 23:30:34 GMT -5
Definetely. If we group abilities according to learned abilities and practiced abilities, we should be fine. Learned abilities can only be increased through adequate study (by reading a book, researching, etc), while practiced abilities can only be increased through application on the field. Thus, if the character wanted to say, learn basic calculus, they would spend a month poring over a book and practicing it. However, if they wanted to learn swordfighting, they would have no choice but to practice it long enough (either with a trainer or on the field) until the GM deems that they have advanced. Of course, at the higher levels of these skills, more exotic conditions should be required.
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 2, 2004 9:11:27 GMT -5
I was talking about keeping track of book knowlede and practical knowledge for each skill. For example, a character can learn lockpicking two different ways. He can pick up a book and read up on lockpicking, or he can just grab a set of picks and go after a lock. Neither of these ways by themselves will be extremely effective, but by reading and practicing together the character will gain skill faster. Obviously, there are some types of skills that need only book knowledge (like calculus), and some types that you can excel at with only practice (like swordplay). When I said "book knowledge", though, I was just referring to any sort of knowledge on the subject gained without practice. A character watching another experienced character using his sword could gain book knowledge of swordplay, and this would help him improve his own swordplay. A character with lots of practical knowledge of swordplay but no book knowledge might not have good form or nice footwork, but he's good at faking it. If he were to get training or to read a book on swordplay his skill might improve drastically as he learns the proper techniques. You see what I'm saying? It's more realistic, but might be tons more complicated. I dunno if it's worth it, but I wanted to bring it up for discussion.
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 2, 2004 12:13:11 GMT -5
Some subjects, such as lockpicking and languages, are so vast that they might need a point in both practical and book knowledge in order to be fully effective. For example, the learned ability of lockpicking would be useful in troubleshooting a lock or making an unpickable one, but the practical knowledge would allow you to actually pick the lock. Similarly, acquiring the learned trait for a language would allow you to read it and analyze it, but only through practice would you get good at actually speaking it. Maybe if the character learned them together it cost less than to learn them seperately? Or maybe having a learned ability gives a penalized chance at performing the practical ability (as opposed to not being able to do it at all).
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 2, 2004 15:44:30 GMT -5
Okay, before I go any farther let's get some of our terms down pat. We're using different terms to refer to the same thing. I've been calling the two types of learning/knowledge "book" and "practical". You're calling them "learned" and "practiced". Practice and practical mean the same thing and as far as I'm concerned are the same term. However I don't think "learned" is a good term for knowledge a character gains without practice, since you learn something when you practice, too. I've been using the term "book", but that's also not quite right because this knowledge isn't always gained through a book.
I learned about these two different forms of knowledge in philosophy class but forgot what they were officially called. I looked it up with google and found that the two types of knowledge are usually called "explicit" and "tacit" knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be expressed with numbers or words (book or learned knowledge). Tacit knowledge is something you just know, either something that comes to you instinctually or something you've practiced (practical or practiced knowledge). Explicit knowledge is knowing the ingredients to make a cake. Tacit knowledge is knowing how to mix and bake everything just right. Unless we come up with something better I'm going to start using these terms.
Now that we have that out of the way, you think it's safe to say that when a character uses a skill he's either using mostly explicit knowledge or mostly tacit knowledge? For example, a locksmith trying to pick a lock would be using mainly tacit knowledge, whereas a locksmith trying to identify a type of lock would be using more explicit knowledge. I think we should keep track of explicit and tacit knowledge separately for each skill. When a character tries to use a skill that requires more tacit knowledge (which will be the case most of the time, I think), he'll use the tacit knowledge number, however he will have a bonus or penalty based on the difference between his tacit knowledge and his explicit knowledge. If his explicit knowledge is greater than his tacit knowledge then he will gain a bonus, but if his explicit knowledge is less then he will have a penalty. The same thing in reverse if he tries to perform an action that requires more explicit knowledge: he will have a bonus or penalty based on whether his tacit knowledge is more or less than his explicit knowledge. The ideal state would be to have fairly equal amounts of tacit and explicit knowledge for a given skill.
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 3, 2004 14:16:29 GMT -5
Perfect. Explicit and tacit is it. The concept of having explicit and tacit knowledge for each ability is fine, but I think we should instead sort abilities (in general) into tacit and explicit instead, mainly because some abilities are purely explicit (such as math and ancient history) and others are purely tacit (such as fire-building or sharpshooting)
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 4, 2004 10:55:47 GMT -5
I agree that some skills may be purely explicit, but I don't think there's very much that is purely tacit. Firebuilding I'll give you, because after basic instructions (explicit) you basically have to figure it out yourself (tacit). But there's always something you could learn about sharpshooting by watching or talking to somebody who's a much better sharpshooter than you are. Sure, you could teach yourself sharpshooting and do it with purely tacit knowledge, but you could always benefit from having some explicit knowledge. A sharpshooter with purely tacit knowledge is just shooting on instinct. He may not know about taking things like wind speed and angle into account, though he may do it without realizing it. However, if he reads a book on sharpshooting and understands the proper way to compensate for wind he becomes much more effective at shooting.
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 4, 2004 23:31:09 GMT -5
Alright, that makes sense. Lets go with that.
Getting back to the idea of succeeding at a task, it'd be simpler if we resorted to only one set of dice for the entire game. I'm in favor of either the d10 or the d100, primarily because they're the most intuitive. Thoughts?
(Is it just me, or are we the only people discussing this game?)
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 5, 2004 10:56:20 GMT -5
I'll vote for d100. It allows for a greater variety than the d10, and like you said it's intuitive. If this wasn't on the computer then I might favor the d10 becaue it's easier to read and/or roll than a d100, but on the computer most people will probably use a virtual die roller and those are moot points. And yes, we seem to be the only ones involved at this point. If anybody else is out there, we'd like your input! Even if it's just "good idea" or "bad idea."
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 5, 2004 22:15:01 GMT -5
Alright. In that case, its simply a matter of a percentile roll to determine success. In order to succeed if in a no-modifier roll, a character should have, say, a 50% chance at success? This is, of course, in the most average conditions imagineable. Situational modifiers and pertinent abilities should affect the roll.
The way it works in the White Wolf system (d10) is that the relevant ability (rated on a scale from 1 to 5) is added to the innate attribute (like strength, intelligence, etc. also rated on a scale from 1 to 5). The total of the two is the number of d10 that the player rolls against an arbitrary difficulty (usually 7). Any rolls that meet or exceed the difficulty are counted as a success. The number of successful rolls determine how successful the character was at performing an action. Likewise, if there are too many failures and if a certain condition is met, the action might result in a botch, which gives a highly undesireable result.
For example, if the character was attempting to bribe a guard, only 1 success would mean that the guard accepted the bribe, but would probably remain suspicious and might report the intrusion to security. A large number of successes (5 or so) would mean that the guard would heartily accept the bribe and might even help the characters a bit. In a normal failure, the guard might just refuse the bribe. In a botch, the guard might alert security or outright attack the characters.
Should we consider something similar? I personally like that system because it not only accounts for all of the variables that we discussed without the need for messy tables or conversions, but also seamlessly integrates the system of degrees of success, leaving a lot of leeway in the hands of the GM and focusing on the role-playing aspect more than the actual dice.
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Post by Merkuri on Jul 10, 2004 14:14:26 GMT -5
So what you're suggesting is that we assign a difficulty to the task (like 50% or 25% or 98%), and then the character rolls a certain amount of dice (how many is based on his natural ability and skill), counting up the successes and using that degree of success to determine the final result (the more successes the better the result).
I know that in the WoD system a 1 is a botch and cancels out one success. How would we handle botches in this system (or wouldn't we)? Perhaps not only should we have a success percentage but a botch percentage, too. So to bribe that guard it might be a 75% difficulty (meaning you need to roll a 75 or higher) and a 5% botch chance (meaning rolling 5 or less is a botch and cancels out one success). Then three successes (or more) causes him to accept the bribe. Any less and he will be suspicious. No successes causes him to attack. A quick way to write it may be 75/5 (meaning 75% for success, 5% for botch). Or should we make a blanket botch number and just say it's 5% (or 10%) for every action?
Since we're using a d100 instead of a d10 there's a huge range of numbers we could use as the difficulty percentage. We should probably take advantage of that and make some sort of system to alter the difficulty, otherwise everything will probably be assigned "even" numbers (like 5%, 50% or 95%). I know that kinda defeats your "no tables" idea, but otherwise having such a large range of numbers seems kinda pointless. Of course, we don't need tables, we could still leave it up to the GM, but we could encourage something like subtracting 4% for small advantages, 8% for "medium", and 16% for huge advantages. So if our guard has recently been pickpocketed (and he knows it), that might give our character a 4% advantage to bribe him, turning the difficulty into 71%. Hmm, maybe those numbers should be a bit larger, like 8%, 16%, and 32%.
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Jul 11, 2004 17:55:25 GMT -5
Well, we could assign difficulties as standard numbers (10%, 20%, etc.) but only allow modification in case of items or abilities. For example, if a character had two years of Spanish under his belt and was trying to converse with a native speaker, the difficulty might be 70/10 (anywhere from 1-10 is a botch, 11-70 is a success, and 71-100 is a failure). If he had a spanish/english dictionary along, it might change to 85/10. If she happened to be talking in a certain dialect that he never studied, it might be 55/10. Something that might just change it by 2 or 3% might be situational factors, like if he had a good day or just got out of Spanish class. Tables shouldn't even be necessary if we give suggestions like this to the GM - they might even decide to be more or less hard on the players based on the difficulty of their campaign.
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Post by CosmicHorror on Aug 26, 2004 1:09:06 GMT -5
Blarg, I really should keep up with this.
I think the d100 does have too large a range. How would you get a raise (using deadlands terminology, a raise is a roll 5 higher then TN (target number, basicly DC), and the more raises you get, the better your action) when you have a range of success? Which end would be considered a better success and which would be a not so great or just success? Ie: the above example with the spanish, is there only three possible outcomes? A success, a botch and a fail? What about levels of success and fail? Perhaps you could have it so that the closer to the fail/botch border, the less able they were to make the roll, or maybe the the closer the roll is to the botch border, the greater the check is?
Just some ideas.
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