Difficulty levels

[Thomas Tamblyn]

Just to clarify what I meant by difficulties relative to character abilities in sorcerer because I'm not sure that acme across too well and its a feature I was very impressed by.

Sorcerer does not make use of absolute difficulties except during actively opposed tasks.  When trying to (bad example follows) break down a door the issue is not how tough the door is, but how tough it is relative to you.  The sorcerer difficulty guides describe dice pools to oppose the character relative tpo their ability - so rather than "3 dice is a fairly easy task" its "If the atsk would be easy for the character, have resist them with one less dice than their pool".

What impressed me about this is that you don't at any point decide how stroing the door is.  Instead its a matter of how likely is this character to break down this door.  its not detailed because it doesn't matter.

When acting directly against other characters of course, you have concrete numbers to deal with because person-to-person conflict is important.

Of course if you were trying to break down a door that your evil twin brother was trying to hold shut, the door is irrelevant and its straight stamina Vs stamina.

And this is probably where Ron steps in and tells me I've got it all wrong.

[Ron Edwards]

Actually, you're spot on.

Best,
Ron

[taalyn]

First, I hadn't confused Scene and Conflict. At least, Mike's definition says I didn't!  But Ron's does - it seems there are two different definitions of a Conflict here. Ron's definition is about PC vs. NPC - a conflict between two (sentient) beings, though a door or a boulder can be beings. Mike's definition says that a conflict is simply a more complex task (likely to have more elements in its causality chain). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you guys, but I think one definition per concept would be nice. :)

Because of the nature of my game, I'm more inclined to use Ron's. Since Aisling deals with Otherworldly beings, some of whom are nature spirits of various types, having a boulder being or a tree being or a river being naturally leads to door beings and tank beings. Therefore, I'm more inclined to the all-opposed side of things (i.e. drawing against Doorness, or Tankness).

One thing I realized as I read and digested Mike's rant is that my mechanic doesn't naturally lend itself to a lot of the discussions here. With the exception of resorting to the actual mechanic and when, other details (probability, layered vs. non) become very difficult to apply.

For example, the caern is a pool of tokens built directly from stat scores. Skills are rated based on their effectiveness is using these essential energies - higher skills mean greater ability to utilize the caern.

Is this a layered system or not? Probabilities can't be standardized, because they're based on individually constructed pools of tokens. The issue is not simply stat+skill, but stat does have an effect.

Both sides have to draw, because there are no standards of probability. I can't resort to an average roll (like d10=5.5) because that depends on the individual caern (though I can fudge it). It's as if  was using 1d20 with 1,2,2,2,2,7,7,8,8,8,0,0,5,5,5,3,9,4,4,4. Odds are all wacky. And the next guy's d20 will be different as well.

With FitM, things get stranger still. More creative players could convert any color mote to a success, while non-creative players may resort to simple adjacency rules - is this an advantage, and if so, for whom?

I think I've created a unique mechanic here - a fuzzy one. All the other token-pool sorts of systems I've seen were either binary (and thus easy to compute odds for) or intensely Dramatic and Narrativist (and thus they ignore issues of probability in general, and even then, the most variety I've seen were 3 colors with the same pool used by all players). I can't help but wonder how task resolution theory applies to a mechanic like this used Simulationst-ly.

I'm toying with the idea of scale as well - since there are Otherworldly beings of all sizes in the game, it seems only fair to recognize that a Pixie will cause less damage than a Giant, and that the Pixie will be harder to hit. Scale would be a modifier to a draw, + or - X motes, where X is the scale of the being. At the same time, easy to hit vs. little damage balances out in play: Giant will hit once causing lots of damage, but Pixie will hit a zillion times causing dinky damage. The combat is balanced, and scale is irrelevant.

Aidan

P.S. I can't pick a topic and stick to it - sorry guys.

[Bruce Baugh]

Interesting, Ron. Geoff Skellams and I have been chatting for a while about modeling environmental challenges - forest fires, say - as characters, and that was a significant influence on the community rules for Gamma World. Looks like I'll be glad I've got Sorcerer coming.

[Mike Holmes]

Mike's definition says that a conflict is simply a more complex task (likely to have more elements in its causality chain). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you guys, but I think one definition per concept would be nice. :)

Then I totally messed up my post, because it was entirely aimed at pointing out that a conflict is NOT, NOT, a longer chain of events. I worked that point over twice, showing how length is independent. Just go with Ron's definition if my post isn't clear, because I agree entirely with him.

One thing I realized as I read and digested Mike's rant is that my mechanic doesn't naturally lend itself to a lot of the discussions here. With the exception of resorting to the actual mechanic and when, other details (probability, layered vs. non) become very difficult to apply.

For example, the caern is a pool of tokens built directly from stat scores. Skills are rated based on their effectiveness is using these essential energies - higher skills mean greater ability to utilize the caern.

Is this a layered system or not? Probabilities can't be standardized, because they're based on individually constructed pools of tokens. The issue is not simply stat+skill, but stat does have an effect.

I'm not sure I follow. I can run the odds on your system if you like. It's somewhat complex, but far from impossible to calculate. Certainly not the hardest thing I've tackled. But I'm not sure how the odds relate to the discussion at all.

With FitM, things get stranger still. More creative players could convert any color mote to a success, while non-creative players may resort to simple adjacency rules - is this an advantage, and if so, for whom?

They all have the option, right? Then does it matter?

I can't help but wonder how task resolution theory applies to a mechanic like this used Simulationst-ly.

I don't think there's a GNS correspondence at all. I think the system will work fine as described. You may want to tweak the probabilities, and we can work on that. But otherwise, I see no problems.

I'm toying with the idea of scale as well - since there are Otherworldly beings of all sizes in the game, it seems only fair to recognize that a Pixie will cause less damage than a Giant, and that the Pixie will be harder to hit. Scale would be a modifier to a draw, + or - X motes, where X is the scale of the being. At the same time, easy to hit vs. little damage balances out in play: Giant will hit once causing lots of damage, but Pixie will hit a zillion times causing dinky damage. The combat is balanced, and scale is irrelevant.

Now that's a Simmy topic if there ever was one. The simplest method is just to suggest to players that their pool of motes should match their physical abilities. Thus a pixie, ought to have one (or maybe even none) of the motes that affect physicality. Whereas giants might just have ten or so (at the possible expense of motes that affect areas like intelligence and speed, etc).

You might even want to consider chargen off of templates if you're going to have great variation.

A system like this would not have a lot of "real world realism", but then your game doesn't seem to center on that at all. In fact, treating a giant as just this guy with a lot of certain kinds of motes sounds really cool to me. The motes make the man. Here's a neat idea, assign dscriptors to each color on the sheet, one for each mote of each color. So, if you have five red motes, you'd have to list five things about the character that relate to those motes. They'd sorta be the reason the character had the motes in the first place. Then, if a descriptor seemed to match a task, that could increase your draw by one representing that mote trying to get out of the bag.

Mike

[taalyn]

Mike,

  Thanks for the clarification - it was more likely to be my misreading than your mis-statement, so no sweat.  

   The issue with odds is not that they can't be calculated (though I would appreciate your help on that - PM me) but that they'll differ for every character. It's somewhat difficult to find standards - it can be done though. Oh, and it doesn't relate - I just can't stick to a single topic very well. Apologies.
    I'm gonna agree with you - scale is irrelevant. And this sort of chargen is different from standard chargen - Fae do follow some templates describing standard variations among the various "races".  I'll start another topic and try to stick to it now. It'll be in Indie games.

  Aidan