Spiritual Attribute Adjustment

[Durgil]

I was wondering if it made sense to anyone to add dice to a pool because of a character's Spiritual Attribute, but to only take the highest x number of dice rolls (where x is the original number of dice in the pool before the Spiritual Attribute adjustment), instead of merely increasing the size of the dice pool.  This way, you still increase the odds of how many successes are rolled without increasing the total possible number of successes.

Just another strange little thought I've had this past week, like that fatigue stuff that I wrote about in the "Thoughts on Fatigue" post.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tony,

What do you mean by the phrase, "makes sense"? In other words, what observed, actual problem during play is this rules-adjustment intended to fix?

Best,
ron

[Durgil]

Well, What I mean is let's say I've got a player who has a knight going into combat to save the life of the Prince that he has sworn to protect (Passion or 4 to protect the Heir to the thrown of the Kingdom).  His CP with Sword and Shield is 15.  If he takes an aggressive stance, throws a red die, and puts 8 into a thrust to the head, he is already going to receive 10 dice to throw.  If I give him 4 more for his Passion, that will put it up to 14 dice (though very unlikely, that will give him a chance for 14 successes).  If I do it the way I was thinking, he still throws 14 dice, but only the highest 10 dice rolls are kept.  I think this other way doesn’t lower the odds of getting any number of successes (up to 10 by the previous example), but lowers the number of possible successes to what it would be without the Spiritual Attribute adjustment.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello Tony,

Apparently I was unclear ... I understand your mechanical rules-tweak perfectly. Please don't feel any need to explain it again.

What I'm asking about is why? Why limit the knight (or whoever) to the same amount of successes he'd get without the SA in operation? Why not allow, permit, and enjoy the extra successes?

In my TROS games, SA's bulk up to 5 quite easily. In many cases, several of them will apply to a given roll, and often into a combat pool. So in your example, this fellow has ten dice from his Proficiency, and he might get about fifteen more if three or four of his SA's are involved (assuming 3 to 5 dice from each one).

Yeah. Twenty-five frigging dice. And yes, potentially anyway, twenty-five successes.

My question to you is, what's undesirable about this situation? Why provide a "fix" for it? Why should the knight be limited to ten successes? I have some ideas regarding your possible answer, but I'd rather hear it from you.

Best,
Ron

[Durgil]

Well, I guess in my minds eye I can only see a particular person with a particular weapon only being able to do so much damage in the absolute best of circumstances.  I can understand the SAs making it easier to reach that maximum number, but not being allowed to exceed it.  It makes me think about my football playing days when the couch would give the team that old half-time pep-talk speech about giving 110%, and thinking to myself, "the very best anyone can ever do is 100% and then faint from exhaustion and die."

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tony,

Interesting. My question to you now is, "Why?" Where does this limitation on your mind's-eye come from? Is it merely habit from the assumptions of other role-playing games?

Fantasy, literature, legend, and myth are full of feats that are beyond what we'd think of as individual-potential maxima, specifically because what was being accomplished meant a lot to the character (and author, and reader) at the moment. Arguably, this quality is one of the main things that distinguishes fiction from real life.

Why cut TROS play off from this feature? Especially when its whole point is to create a hero-saga in the tradition of great myth, legend, and literature.

I ask this with respect: have you actually played the game? It's very different from running the combat simulation. If you have played, then have you or anyone at the table been literally jarred out of enjoyment because of the "extra-potential" feats that SA's made possible? Or does this "discomfort level" that you're trying to fix only exist in your anticipation of play?

Best,
Ron

[Mokkurkalfe]

He does have a point. Some people might find it far-fetched that someone who physically cannot chop off an arm in normal cases now can. To me though, this would only be relevant for those characters than cannot chop an arm off even if they succeed with *all* their dice in their CP and their opponent fumbles. And against anything that invulnerable, the character will be dead anyway, so it's not like it will come into play.
That's my take on it anyway.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Joakim,

I'm still looking for the answer to "Why?" Your statement, "some people might find it farfetched" does not answer that question.

TROS (or any role-playing game, or any work of fiction) does not have a set of realistic/plausible standards that it must necessarily match to. Nor is any such set of standards automatically the same across real people. Nor is, at any point, the number of dice in a Proficiency defined as the "top potential for performance" for a given character.

That's what interests me. Why are you and Tony reading the fact that a character has Proficiency: Longsword 10 as a direct, literal indicator that the most damage the guy can do with a longsword is 10 successes? You are reading this into the text - it isn't there. According to the text and rules of the game, 10 dice is this guy's baseline foundation for damage/competence, onto which his SA's are added, when they are relevant. That's how the game works.

Please note my question. I am not stating that your approach is wrong, or bad. If you were to play TROS with your suggestion in action, you'd probably have fun, and that's cool. However, that represents Drift, to use the technical Forge term, and I'd like to point out that such Drift is due to your assumptions and preferences and not to any flaw in the game itself.

Best,
Ron

[Mokkurkalfe]

Good point again.

I suppose the answer to your "why?" question is, "It'd feel more real to me".
It's a question of personal taste and rules interpretation. Tony interprets profencies as your maximum ability to cause damage/hit/whatever and the SA's as something that will inrease the chance to perform on that level, while Ron interprets profencies and the SA's together as the maximum ability to kick ass.
Please correct me here if I am making too many assumptions.
Personally, I view SA's as a part of the maximum ability.

[Durgil]

...Where does this limitation on your mind's-eye come from? Is it merely habit from the assumptions of other role-playing games?

No, I guess what I'm picturing is those test that I've seen pictures of (I think some where on the ARMA website) where people test the strength of various types of armour like studded leather or mail by placing them over a large chunk of meat and taking a big hack at it.  Then they show the condition of the armour and how far into the meat the weapon got.  That to me is the ideal situation: a downward swing where you get the added force of using your body on a stationary subject.  This would be represented by how many dice you get in your CP.  This to me is a maximum amount of damage that you are capable of with that particular type of weapon not matter how much you hated the leg of cow:-).

I ask this with respect: have you actually played the game? It's very different from running the combat simulation. If you have played, then have you or anyone at the table been literally jarred out of enjoyment because of the "extra-potential" feats that SA's made possible? Or does this "discomfort level" that you're trying to fix only exist in your anticipation of play?

Admittingly no, but I do cring a little when I read about adding 10 or 15 dice using SA's in statements made right here on this forum.

Mathematically speaking even with a low TN, the odds of rolling 10 successes is fairly low.  Adding 10 dice increases the odds substantially, and it wouldn't even be unheard of to receive more than 10 successes in that situation.  Now taking the best 10 rolls out of a pool of 20 means you're still going to receive 10 successes just as often as before, but you can only get 10 (your opponent is standing still and you get to put all of your strength and weight into the swing).

He does have a point. Some people might find it far-fetched that someone who physically cannot chop off an arm in normal cases now can. To me though, this would only be relevant for those characters than cannot chop an arm off even if they succeed with *all* their dice in their CP and their opponent fumbles.

An arm is one thing, a Gol Captain's arm in full plate is another.

[Durgil]

Tony interprets profencies as your maximum ability to cause damage/hit/whatever and the SA's as something that will inrease the chance to perform on that level, while Ron interprets profencies and the SA's together as the maximum ability to kick ass.
Please correct me here if I am making too many assumptions.
Personally, I view SA's as a part of the maximum ability.

Ah, that's what I was looking for.  That makes total sense to me, thanks Joakim.

[Mokkurkalfe]

Glad to be of help.

To be extremely nitpicky, a Gol Captain's armoured arm is in fact also an arm, and not something else! :-)

[Valamir]

The issue is obviously one of adherance to "real world" reality vs. the possibilities of "heroic" reality.  

TROS has a solid foundation in "real world" reality, but is clearly designed to be played within a "heroic" framework.

By the standards of a "heroic" framework then it is entirely plausible that a sword which under "ideal testing conditions" could only penetrate 6 inches through a well made piece of plate, could, when powered by "all your hate, all your love, all your fear" (to roughly paraphrase from Rocky) chop a plate mailed Gol in half.  That is the reality of the heroic frame, that that sort of thing IS possible.

Now with that said, even then I wouldn't be too hasty to dismiss such an occurance from the "real world" framework either.  First of all, our best efforts at understanding how a sword fight really works are still a long ways off from truly experienceing and understanding what period practitioners knew and took for granted.  Many of the period training manuals we have today assume a level of basic knowledge that users of the day must obviously have been familiar with but which users today struggle mightily to recreate.  Point being that any rule change made with the objective of being "more realistic" must be taken with a grain of salt that we really don't know for sure what "realistic" necessarily means.  Further we have plenty of anecdotes of near superhuman feats (mother lifting automobiles off of trapped children, etc.) which really are what SA's are all about.


Soooo, to get to the real point of my post, when Ron asks "why" he's not at all being dismissive or snarky he's really asking why?  The idea behind the question is that a rules idea should never be implemented unless there is a clear motivating factor / issue / problem that the implementer is trying to account for / address / fix.  Because only by knowing what the change is supposed to accomplish can we evaluate whether its good or not (i.e. does it do what its supposed to).

So...to summarize, I hear some indications that this idea would make combat "more realistic" but that is a pretty vague hard to define term.  Durgil puts some harder ideas down when he talks about the ideal tests setting an upper limit for what should be possible.  Of course to be truly correct, the "realistically tested" upper limit should coincide with the game's die pool upper limit if this reasoning is to work properly.  I doubt that Jake was attempting to do this when he invented the die pools so such a line of reasoning (i.e. that the die pool represents the actual upper limit under ideal conditions) might not be a valid assumption.

If I'm correct so far, than my next question would be:  "how do you account for those 'Ripley's Believe it or Not' moments when real humans actually do amazing things that they'd never have been able to do under some "ideal testing" condition, but which they ARE able to do when hyped up on adreniline fueled by some powerful emotion.  My answer to this question (and the game's in its current form) would be that that is what the SA's represent.  Now of course, that means that such feats of "super human" achievement will occur more freqently than one generally hear's about in the "real world", but that would be consistant with the idea of the characters as heroes in a heroic story.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Ralph has nailed it with his point that "it's realistic" is no answer at all. The real question is, why do you, Tony, consider it desirable to have that level of "realism" be part of playing TROS? Because it's not at all obvious, a priori.

Another point regarding Ralph's post, and central to the question I'm posing: I'm not very interested in accounting for reported instances of superhuman feats in the real world. That's not relevant to playing TROS, for me. What's relevant instead is accounting for such feats at emotionally-loaded moments in fiction (legend, literature, etc). It is grossly obvious that such moments are the payoff, the "money shot" in stories - when the hero cares more about Accomplishing X, he is not only better at it in that moment, he is also suddenly capable of accomplishing Much More Than X.

Realistic? Probably not. Widespread in fiction, legend, etc? Absolutely. Central to the very idea of a heroic protagonist? I would say so.

Therefore to remove this feature from TROS removes one of the ways in which TROS produces fiction / legend / myth. I'm still interested in hearing why anyone would want to do this, in the name of some vaguely defined "realism."

Best,
Ron

[Brian Leybourne]

Couldn't agree more, Ron.

Since we're talking heroic fantasy and not real-life, lets look at The Fellowship of the Ring (the film).

At the end, it's not realistic that Boromir could keep fighting with 1 and then 2 arrows in him, his CP must have been almost zip by that point, but his SA's kept him going, thus the "heroic fuelled" SA use Ron is talking about.

(What SA's? Well, I would suggest that his realisation that he almost betrayed everyone by attacking Frodo, followed almost immediately by seeing Merry and Pippin about to be attacked forced an SA change giving him "Passion: Protect Merry and Pippin". His Conscience would have been playing a part as well, plus his Destiny "Die surrounded by the corpses of slain foes", and probably Luck as well. There's no other way to account for the screeds of Urik-Hai he killed, nearly single handedly.)

Similarly, Aragorn probably couldn't drive his sword right through an Urik-Hai's neck under normal circumstances (particularly given the heavy armor it was wearing), but fuelled by hatred, passion to save Boromir, etc (i.e. heavy SA use) he hacks off it's arm and then it's head in quick succession.

Brian.