Translate rating to a full fledged NPC on the fly?!

[Christoffer Lernö]

Sorry for the many threads but this problem is really, really driving me crazy. Any hints how to get started would be greatly appreciated.

The situation is this: imagine you want to rate a threat from a monster/situation. Forget the scale for a second. You kind of plan it in a "this monster has threat n" way. When the players want to interact with it (this usually means fighting, folks!) you need to translate it into numbers such as fighting ability, damage from attack and so on.

A good example of this in play would be the point system of Champions.

You can say: "Gee these characters have 250 each and they are 4, so if I give them a 500 point boss then I know they will have this and that much chance to win"

It's not until the characters are actually sizing up the opponent (that means they'll be fighting, folks!) that stats and powers become interesting.

Now this is exacty what I want... with one minor change: I want to be able to do it on the fly.

For it to be useful it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to figure out how high I can make the stats and how strong I can get the powers (we assume I know approximately how I want the stats distributed and what powers I want to use).

A tall order perhaps. Has anyone seen it done somewhere? Any comments from say seasoned Champions GMs if they think this is doable?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Christoffer, what you're running into is what I call "layers." Points in the Hero System, for example, don't themselves represent anything; they're a means of Currency to build stuff relative to other stuff, within a character sheet. So that's one "layer," from bank of points to numbers on the sheet. (In fact, the original Hero System distinguished between "points" and "pips" to try to keep this clear.) Then there's a second layer, from the descriptive numbers which the points bought to the actual values that you need to consider during play.

Specific example (made up on the fly): my super-guy, Photon Boy, has a DEX of 23. That costs him 39 character points (base 10 DEX, 13 added, 3 points per pip of DEX). But now I need to consider his Combat Value, which is pretty much the key number for resolving attacks and defenses. CV is DEX/3, so in his case, it's rounded to 8.

Tons of games have reduced the necessary layers - literally, tons of them. Layer-reducing is a trend you can see across nearly all games released in the last ten years, especially in terms of having attributes be the effective values, and for point-spending (if any) for those attributes to be 1:1 rather than graded per attribute.

Hero Wars is the king of games to toss the entire issue out the window and simply get down to the necessary numbers of play. The numbers of a characters' abilities are the effective values, and absolutely no other derivation or consideration is necessary. If you want to toss a New Guy at them This Minute, and if the "threat" involved is well-suited to be 5w2 (this is Hero Wars notation), then by gum, his ability of note is 5w2. It really is that easy.

Best,
Ron

[Christoffer Lernö]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Ron. You nailed it about the layering. Layering IS the main issue here.

BTW. Doesn't even Hero Wars - the king of few-layered games - still retain a bit of layering? - I'm thinking about the augmentation mechanics.

Now given the constraints that I can't reduce the layering by much, what else can be done to minimize the problems of layering?

For Hero Wars the augmentation mechanics are minor so the influence may be disregarded.
But if one isn't that lucky and instead have maybe 2+ factors [that say for example] the fighting ability is depending on, are there any tricks to combine them and treat them as a single rating?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christoffer,

Augmentation is a weeny bit of layering perhaps, but I don't think it's a minor aspect of play. Depending on how one decides to interpret the rules, it can be extremely significant. The good news is that it's very easy, and hence the layering is indeed minor.

I have never been too comfortable with the combat abilities in Hero Wars, in that there are general abilities called Close Combat and Ranged Combat, and then specified abilities for weapons, and I suspect different groups vary in their application of these rules. I basically ignored them - an ability is an ability. Others, I think, have been very concerned that they reflect general vs. trained ability or some such thing. But I agree, yes, that is a layering element as well.

I assume you are simply removing games which do not concern themselves with NPC numbers from consideration? In Trollbabe, NPCs don't have any numbers at all, except occasionally for a stated modifier (penalty) to the player-characters' rolls.

Another important option, long-overlooked and unappreciated, is the brilliant design of The Whispering Vault in this regard. NPC characters and beings have two key numbers: the one that the player rolls against in order to hit the thing, and the one that the player rolls against in order not to be hit by it. (This system concept was called "semi-diceless" in Legendary Lives, meaning the GM never rolls.) In The Whispering Vault, creatures can be extremely sophisticated and variable in their features, with a lot of solid logic and very little pain involved in generating them.

Zero also has quick and easy creatures and numbers-mechanics, although I can't reel them off from memory for non-player entities.

Best,
Ron

[GreatWolf]

And, to riff off the Whispering Vault concept, here's an idea.

In WV, different named difficulty levels (e.g. "Routine") are tied to a specific difficulty number (IIRC, Routine=6).  So, when the GM determined the difficulty, he'd use the name to determine difficulty and reference the target number.

So, in WV, you could conceivably decide that this monster is Hard.  (For the sake of this discussion, let's say that the difficulty number is 12).  Therefore, all this monster's stats are 12.  So he looks something like this:

Attack 12
Defense 12
Perception 12

...and I'm forgetting the rest of the stats.  Anyways, you get the idea.

Now you can bump numbers by (say) +/-3 to fine-tune your concept.

That would provide a system where you could create an enemy on the fly.

Another game perhaps worth looking into is Rune.  Monsters are basically only a difficulty rating, which modifies the baseline stat value, which is determined from character values.  This design is supposed to self-balance the game.  (It does a decent job.)  However, it also reaches those "on-the-fly" goals that you're wanting.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Marco]

I have a specific experience with this I want to share (it's specific to Simmy games like Hero or GURPS or whatever):

The combat value of a being in a game system depends on context and mechanics--it may not be possible to caclulate a "Power Factor" for a given being depending on how universal you want the scale to be.

When we were doing a monsters book I wanted a power-factor for each beast (like HD in AD&D)--because the system we were working with was universal it was a bit more difficult.

Some things we tried:
1. Just run the numbers
Some things don't add up well (this is, I think, what Ron's talking about in Layering)--but worse, if things may or may not stack in a given situation (I'm not familiar with Hero Wars--but if an antagonist might get to use his trait in a fight, how do you calculate it? It gets harder and harder in things like Hero.

Another failing of this procedure is that it doesn't tell you much that looking at the description doesn't tell you--that is, you can't just have a big table of "Fire Boar .... 27"  You lose the abstraction that a threat-level is supposed to convey.

2. Find out what it'd take to beat it
We used "Barbarians" as a unit of measure at one point. I made a "stereotypical" barbarian with a "typical" to-hit score and we made a combat simulator that would run 1,2, 3, etc. at the thing.  This was complicated because the simulator didn't really account for tactics (but that should factor out anway), and didn't do a good job on special powers (if the thing can fly and breath fire and you fight it out doors and the Barbarian has no good ranged attack ...)

Finally, because armor in the (sim) system we were using reduces damage once the armor value got high enough, no number of barbarians would beat it.

3. Use the better than X but worse than Y approach.
In the game Star Fleet Battles ships (based on Star Trek) have a BPV of how many "ponts they cost." SFB is harder than Law School. SFB is harder than Computer Engineering. SFB is very, very, very complex. We wondered for years (and they were silent) about how they came up with these specific BPV's for ships.

I have been told (with some authority--but I dunno for sure) that there *was* a calculation but that gave a basic range but after that they sat down and talked about it (is this ship better or worse than that one--and under what circumstances)--and then added or subtracted a few points based on that.

This is perhaps the best way to rate power-factor since it has an implicitly human element.

---------------------

Anyway, doing it on the fly seems almost impossible to me if you have a complex enough game system and wish the number to be in some sense objective (i.e. not "is the NPC tougher than the players at this time") I think it comes down to eyeballing them.

-Marco

[Walt Freitag]

There's another approach you could consider. If you want to make up a character on the fly, then why not do it on the fly? That is, as needed during the encounter or combat, rather than all at once at the beginning?

For example, you could give the encounter (NOT the NPC, though the difference is subtle) two point ratings: the total number of points the character can expend for the encounter, and the maximum number of points the character can expend in one hostile action or in one combat round. The first score represents the encounter's potential significance; the second its potential danger.

Each action of the NPC has a point cost, which varies depending on the appropriate parameters. The cost of an attack against a PC would depend on the skill level of the attack. Spells, self-healing, additional weapons, defense, etc. would also cost points. The GM is responsible for plausible continuity, so that e.g. suddenly using a higher attack skill than before would need a reason. When the point pool starts getting exhausted, it's time to bring the encounter to a conclusion, and if the encounter runs out of points, it can no longer be effective against the player-characters (for example, the NPC might start trying to escape or surrender).

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly how I (quite a long time ago) recommended handling the power levels of things like creepy forests or raging storms. In other words, it treats the combat encounter as primarily a scene to be generated, rather than as a character to be invented (with the results then causally determined with no further GM input).

The cool thing is that large-scale adversaries (including abstract adversaries) would often use their points to spawn smaller-scale ones, such as a hostile forest creating an attack by giant spiders.

This is kinda radical, going whole hog into the "GM uses different mechanics than players" idea and extending it down even into individual combats. The problem, I suppose, is that if you want the game to look conventional to the players, it would be necessary to keep that whole aspect of the system secret from them, which doesn't sound possible. But maybe, because the GM is in fact operating under specific constraints, at least part of that audience would find it acceptable as an overt system.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

1. Just run the numbers
Some things don't add up well (this is, I think, what Ron's talking about in Layering)--but worse, if things may or may not stack in a given situation (I'm not familiar with Hero Wars--but if an antagonist might get to use his trait in a fight, how do you calculate it? It gets harder and harder in things like Hero.

Yep, in Hero system the Active point totals of the powers are by far more indicative of danger than the point total. I mean just how dangerous is "Life Support: doesn't need to eat" to an opposing combatant (less than the three points chrged for it, certainly).

As to the Hero Wars thing, that's a good point. Yet, again, the threat can still be assessed simply by looking at the likely suspects. So, if you have two combatants who have applicable traits of 5w, and one has a secondary attribute of 19 and the other of 17, I give the combat to the first guy on odds. But here's the cool part. You can be garunteed that the fight will be cool. IOW, as long as the primary ability is within one or two, no secondary ability is likely to be able to sway the combat so much as to make it a sure thing. As such using the primary rating is really all you need.

In practice, in play, I never stat anything out before hand in HW. I just make up all the abilities as I need them. So, Josh's character goes up against another Sorcerer? I just note that sorcerers start with a 17 stat, and pump it up a bit if I want it to be a tougher fight. Need an augment? I just create a Gritty ability at 13 or so. That's the cool thing. As long as the ability isn't way out of the range of reasonable levels it will make sense in the fight, and won't unbalance it. Which is even cooler, beacuse it means that the opponents are created through play as a result of the drama thus ensuring their dramatic appropriateness (how's that for effect first, Christoffer?).

2. Find out what it'd take to beat it
We used "Barbarians" as a unit of measure at one point. I made a "stereotypical" barbarian with a "typical" to-hit score and we made a combat simulator that would run 1,2, 3, etc. at the thing.  This was complicated because the simulator didn't really account for tactics (but that should factor out anway), and didn't do a good job on special powers (if the thing can fly and breath fire and you fight it out doors and the Barbarian has no good ranged attack ...)

Finally, because armor in the (sim) system we were using reduces damage once the armor value got high enough, no number of barbarians would beat it.

Fun.

You need to use two character types. Barbarians and peasants. Peasants are sorta fractional barbarians. But jack up the barbarians so that they can get through most armors. Then a barbarian becomes the large blocky statement about power, and peasants are a more refined scale. Thus, a rat requires one peasant, and a pig, possibly two. But a Jabberwock may require three barbarians (and drop the fractional peasant).

3. Use the better than X but worse than Y approach.
In the game Star Fleet Battles ships (based on Star Trek) have a BPV of how many "ponts they cost." SFB is harder than Law School. SFB is harder than Computer Engineering. SFB is very, very, very complex. We wondered for years (and they were silent) about how they came up with these specific BPV's for ships.

I have been told (with some authority--but I dunno for sure) that there *was* a calculation but that gave a basic range but after that they sat down and talked about it (is this ship better or worse than that one--and under what circumstances)--and then added or subtracted a few points based on that.

The "formula" is based onadding the values of the components up. There are actually two values, the BPV, which represents combat value, and the EPV which represents the economic costs of production, and includes the ship's non-combat abilities in the assesment as well.

But, yes, even when you add things up this way, you see that they had to fudge a bit because there are certain efficiencies that can be garnered by certain combinations. Most importantly what's referred to as the Power Curve. As such, they decided that it was easiest to caculate these "intangibles" by eye.

What does this mean? Same thing that Ron's been saying. The more complicated the bean counting, the less likely the system is to have a point total that means anything. As it says in, IIRC, the GURPS Companion I, the point system is just there to tell players when to stop spending. It has nothing to do with "balance" of any sort.  

As such, you need to have other objective means of rating things. As one can see from Hero System, and Hero Wars, both, the way is to just look at the highest rated ability often. In D&D it's the bonus to hit more than anything else that will be telling.

Mike

[JMendes]

Hey, all, :)

For example, you could give the encounter (NOT the NPC, though the difference is subtle) two point ratings: the total number of points the character can expend for the encounter, and the maximum number of points the character can expend in one hostile action or in one combat round. The first score represents the encounter's potential significance; the second its potential danger.

Each action of the NPC has a point cost, which varies depending on the appropriate parameters. The cost of an attack against a PC would depend on the skill level of the attack. Spells, self-healing, additional weapons, defense, etc. would also cost points. The GM is responsible for plausible continuity, so that e.g. suddenly using a higher attack skill than before would need a reason. When the point pool starts getting exhausted, it's time to bring the encounter to a conclusion, and if the encounter runs out of points, it can no longer be effective against the player-characters (for example, the NPC might start trying to escape or surrender).

Aha! Aha! Chunk theory! Way cool. I shall now go post a reference to this thread in the thread about El Dorado. Yay!

Cheers,

J.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Wow! This thread really spawned some great ideas.

Seth: The Whispering Vault derivative sounds like a great idea. Thanks for mentioning it! I had WV for like 3 weeks of which 2 were filled with intense playing of said game. Then I borrowed that treasure to a friend and it became lost in action *sniff!* For some mysterious reason (hmm... I sense a conspiracy) I couldn't remember a single thing about the mechanics afterwards.

Walt: I've been toying with your idea since you presented it (you know back in the "protagonizing setting"-days), but I still haven't wrapped my head around the idea of the point pool actually running out and ending the scene. My more straightforward take would be a pool of points from which you construct the npcs and things and once they are constructed they "exist". I don't know if that is missing your point. Could you expand a little on it?

Otherwise, I think a point sum for an encounter is a brilliant idea (as long as there is a simple mechanism for using the points that is). That way, maybe you have points for 10 enemies but only throw in 5 to begin with. With the extra points you can create magic powers for the 5 or have some deus ex machina happening or something - whatever the scene requires. This works best of course when joined with the "setting with point pools" and such. Mmm cool mechanics.

Mike: If I understand the geist of your reply, it's "look at the most important rating first", right? In it's simplicity that's pure genious! That tool will come in handy...

And I see all these three method listed above as easily working together (at least theoretically).

For me personally this thread was important as it ties into my design process, but I also hope some others also take note of these ideas. They are too useful to be used only for one single design.

[Walt Freitag]

Christoffer,

You're correct about the problem of "point pool running out = ending of scene." There has to be more going on than just the point pool itself. There must be some sort of scene-building mechanism for guiding scenes toward resolution that the point pool is powering. The point pool is like the fuel gauge in a car; the car doesn't stop because the fuel gauge reaches Empty, it stops because it's out of gas (which also causes the fuel gauge to reach Empty).

That's why JMendes perceived a connection between the point pool and Chunk Theory. The mysterious mechanisms I'm thinking of (and haven't worked out well enough to describe yet) do indeed tend to look a lot like the "chunks" in Chunk Theory.

I don't see the points in the pool as representing the ability to act (or exist), so much as the ability to change the outcome. (The difference wouldn't be obvious in all cases, but it would mean that a point pool used for a combat scene would definitely not represent some NPC's hit points or endurance.) A scene ends when the outcome can no longer be changed by anyone. But I'm not sure yet whether or not one or more specific outcomes imagined before the fact should be involved as goals. (That would make it sort of like a fractal version of the Shadows/Thord of Lerings resolution system. It would also kind of fit into the basic Effect-First idea, but the GM-forcefulness would be attenuated by the scene-development process.)

Sorry to leave you with such a half-baked idea. Probably there's something you can do with encounter point pools that's a bit more straightforward than what I've been thinking of here. Like, as you suggested, go ahead and have the points represent in-game-world power like your Mythpower rather than some metagame drama value, and once an actual NPC is involved, play out their actions in a more conventional way.

Or, perhaps, make the point costs for actions be based on their results (that is, effects on the player-characters). So the giant spider that fights the PCs only pays points when it actually does harm to the PCs; and the cost paid by the Forest to create the giant spider encounter isn't known until after that encounter is over.

- Walt

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Chrisoffer,

What you have sound a awful lot like what I was doing with Tunnels & Trolls. Let me know if you want me to elaborate. (can't right now, sorry)

EDIT: OK, I have time now.

Tunnels & Trolls broke monsters down into a Monster Rating or MR. This was a general rating of how tough the monster was. COmbat in T&T consists of Dice and Adds. You roll d6's equal to your dice, and added your Adds to the result. Both sides in a combat rolled and added and compared results. The one who rolled higher won the combat round, and the other take the difference in damage.

Anyway, to use the MR in combat, you took 1/10th of the MR, rounding up. This is the dice. Then you take 1/4 of the MR and that's the Adds (or 1/2 depending on who you talk to)

So a monster with an MR of

24 has 3d6 + 6
10 has 2d6 + 3
123 has 13d6 + 41

Easy peasy. You just always round up and if it's dead even, like 1/10th of 10 is 1, you add a die. No biggy. Dice & Adds are pretty flavorless, but T&T had flavorless combat, really.

Now the beauty of this is that any damage the monster takes comes off of the MR, which lowers the dice and adds, so a monster loses combat effectiveness as it receives wounds.

I had been trying to dope out how to make an MR for player characters out of their stats so that the PC can have such a nifty mechanic, but I gave up on that years ago, but that's just me.

I hope I have given you a few ideas.

[C. Edwards]

My current angle of attack for determining when a scene ends in Omega Point is similar to what Walt is suggesting.

Resolution rolls create "dramatic weight".  This may be an amount of "success" or "failure".  Each encounter has 3 values, the total amount of dramatic success needed to end the encounter in the characters favor, the total amount of dramatic failure needed to end the encounter not in the characters favor, and a total amount of dramatic weight to end the encounter in a "draw", an unresolved ending.

The in-game conflict continues until one of the totals is reached.  That signifies to the GM that the scene should now be wrapped up, no more resolution rolls should be made.  There are some other factors specific to Omega Point, but that is the basic idea.  I would think that something similar would be adaptable to most any game.

Hope that helps.

-Chris

[Christoffer Lernö]

A really quick question here about scaling.

I'm trying to actually write some practical mechanics for this and I run into the following question:

If I have a threat 3 monster and a threat 4 monster, what threat do they pose together? Or if 1 monster is threat 1, what about 100 of the same monsters? (Threat being the "rating" for challenges)

This only has to be a rough rule, but the important thing is that you should be able to say: "well this dragon is about as dangerous a hundred trolls taken together" with a trivial calculation/table lookup.

It doesn't matter if it's exactly true as long as it's a working rule of thumb.

An old idea was the square root trick: sum the squares of all the ratings and take the square root of that. But even I can see that's not trivial. (The combined threat of the above examples are incidentally 5 and 10 respectively).

If we're only handling a homogenous group, then a doubling or tripling rule could work so that every time you double (or triple) the amount of entities the threat goes up with one step.

Something like this:
1 zombie = Threat 1
2-3 zombies = Threat 2
4-7 zombies = Threat 3
8-15 zombies = Threat 4
and so on.

However it's not obvious what the combined threat would be in this case.

As an emergency one could translate all entities to a number of threat 1 entities. And then add them... An example is easier to follow I think:

I have a warlock (threat 6), a skeletal captain (threat 3) and 9 skeletons. Let's say the skeletons default to threat 1.

We then look up how many skeletons a threat 6 (the warlock) means: Between 32 and 63. We pick the lowest number: 32

The skeleton captain (threat 3) corresponds to 4 skeletons.

So we have 9 skeletons + 32 (for the warlock) + 4 (for the captain) which lands us at an equivalent of 45 skeletons. The total threat for the group is thus 45 skeletons or a Threat of 6.[/list:u]

I don't remember the path Champions took out of this but Champion did have it's "5 points (or was that ten?) more means twice the power of the rating before it".

[Mike Holmes]

The law of diminishing returns.

If it applies, and you want to be really rigorous, in almost all RW cases, the function that determines the taper is the natural log.

But geometric or logarithmic expansion can serve just as well.

The problem is that the math then can get screwed up. Take for example Hero System. As weight doubles, "Body" increases by one. Similarly, as strength doubles, damage goes up by one class. Thus we see that these things are relating to themselves in a geometric manner.

But damage itself adds in the usual fashion. That is 4 damage and 5 damage = 9 damage. When in fact, if 5 is twice 4, then they should not add in that manner. 5 + 5 = 6 in this case. But for simplicity sake, this is ignored. Which leads to the problem of being able to fell trees in but a couple of axe swings (instead of taking potentially hundreds) and the like.

So, yes, use such a system, but implement it carefully.

Mike