For some time now I've been brooding over an RPG system (called Ur, which is an acronym for Ultimate RPG - rather pretentious, I know, but Ur is just too cool to give up on), which is supposed to be as realistic as possible (i.e. "a Simulationist's heaven"). The premise was: "The purpose of Ur is to start from a clean slate and with an open mind, and thus achieve the most realistic system that the world of RPGs is capable of. On every claim of 'this is not the way it works in real life' presented to me, I will not rest until I either convince the claimer otherwise or change the rules to better fit reality."
It is supposed to be a Generic RPG, bringing the idea of Generic to a whole new level. The main aspect I'm working on currently is that of Abilities and Skills - the idea is that no Abilities and Skills are presented in the core system at all. All there is are the tools for the creation of such (it will get a lot clearer later on). The whole thing is thus divided into 3 layers: the System, the Environment (same as setting, which provides all the Abilities and Skills and other general information), and the World (things like actual map of the world etc).
The catch is that the whole thing is obviously so horribly complicated, that it will be basically impossible to play without the assistance of some computer software to quickly make all the math (something I've been aware of since the beginning). What I'm asking of you (and the reason I'm posting here at all, aside of making myself known to the world) is to read the general ideas I have in mind and say if you think they have any potential whatsoever - can they appeal to anyone, or am I really going way too far with this. I've simply had no professional feedback on this hitherto, and don't really want to continue "blind".
(Note: I am aware that the forum rules ask not to post long excerpts from the text, but my FTP host  hasrecently died, leaving me with nowhere to host this.)

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]

Abilities and Skills: The General Concept

   Of the most important things in Ur is the Ability-Skill Tree (AST), which gives all the details about each ability and skill and shows how they are connected to each other and how they affect each other (in the future, whenever a reference is made to something that may be a skill or an ability, it will be called a capability).
   Capabilities are essential qualities of a person. Whenever performing an action that might be in any way performed better or worse, the person in fact uses one (and only one) of his capabilities.
   What is then the difference between abilities and skills? Abilities are actions that can be performed without learning (untrained), while skills cannot be attempted without learning. A weak person may attempt to lift a heavy stone – without much success, though, but it’s still an understandable attempt. However, if a man who doesn’t know how to play cards (should there be a “card playing” skill) would attempt to play cards, it would appear very odd, and wouldn’t help anyone. Even the worst of the card players knows how to play.

   Each capability has two efficiency values – the Self Efficiency value and the Eventual Efficiency value.
   The Self Efficiency determines how good one is at a certain capability, without taking in consideration all the other capabilities affecting it.
   The Eventual Efficiency determines, after everything has been considered, just how well one performs the action at hand.
   For example, let’s assume that playing a certain card game (a skill) depends highly on the mathematical thinking of the character (an ability). If the character trained for years in playing this specific card game, certainly the Self Efficiency value of the skill would be high. However, if the character's mathematical thinking is abysmal, then the Eventual Efficiency value of the said card playing skill would be rather low.

   The Self Efficiency of skills is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, where a value of 0 means that the skill has not been learnt yet, and thus the action at hand cannot be attempted at all (no matter what the Eventual Efficiency of that skill is). The Self Efficiency of abilities is measured on a scale where 1 is the minimum and the maximum is anything between 100 and 200 (determined by the talent for the specific ability and by other possible factors).
   The scales of the Eventual Efficiency values are derived from the scales above, and are not further restricted in any way.

What is the idea behind the AST?
   The idea behind the AST is to provide all the information about the different capabilities. As has been said, the AST provides the detailed information about each capability on its own, and it also provides the information regarding how the different capabilities affect each other – being good at one capability may make the character better at another capability, and so on.
   In this document, an AST is not provided, but rather there are tools for creating the AST, which is a part of the Environment.
   The AST is used for 2 things. First, it is used to determine the Eventual Efficiency of the capability at hand, based on the Self Efficiencies of the capabilities downwards connected to it. Second, it is used for the issue of experience. When a person performs a certain task, he actually trains himself at performing similar tasks, and thus gets more experienced (efficient) at performing them – which means, of course, that the Self Efficiency value of the capability responsible for the task increases, but which also means that the Self Efficiency values of related capabilities increase as well, as they are getting trained too, although indirectly. Then, there are less obvious cases, when getting more capable at a certain capability lowers the Self Efficiency values of other capabilities (for example, although this is not the way things work in our world, one is free to create a world where becoming stronger damages one's intelligence); and the last two available options are that having a low Self Efficiency value at a certain capability either increases or decreases the Self Efficiency values of connected capabilities.

Is that all there is to capabilities?
   No. Capabilities have certain factors (such as, how quickly it is being forgotten after certain time of not being used), which position the capability on certain scales. This means that each capability is unique not only by its position in the AST but also by its unique scores in the factors (and its name, of course).

And what makes a character unique?
   What makes a character unique are two things. First, there are the efficiency values for all the different capabilities. Then, there is talent. When the player creates his character, he assigns talent points to various abilities (not skills), which define how talented the character is in these abilities. (Among the things that talent affects are the top Self Efficiency limits for abilities.)

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]

That's it for now. I do have more detailed and practical ideas about the specific factors of capabilities, talent points and some of the math behind the whole thing, but it is all (and especially the math part) very rudimentary.
Also, I am aware that the text is slighlty (or not slightly) cumbersome and a bit hard to read through, but this is only an initial draft, and I'm mainly concerned with simply putting my ideas on paper. Sorry for this.

And a techincal question for the end: if I get it correctly, every time from now on I post something regarding my system, I should put [Ur] at the beginning of the post's title; right?

P.S. Although I'm really doing my best, excuse me for any English oddities and mistakes, as English is not my mother tongue.

ODDin wrote:
[It] is supposed to be as realistic as possible (i.e. "a Simulationist's heaven").

I'd be interested to see where you go with this. I've had some similar ideas regarding complex skill webs, requiring computer moderation.

One thing I'd like to see is if you can come up with good heuristics for designing the web in the first place -- how much training each skill effects which other skills is obviously a very complex process, and while you can obviously just say that the web you have defines how it is in the world, it would be nice to be able to build something that people agree is a fair model of reality.

One thing to think about is how subskills and specializations work. I've thought about few 'use cases' that you could think about for helping design the model.
1) Could you build it to represent the web of medical specialties. E.g., can you distinguish the skill sets of, say, a surgical intern, a practicing general surgeon,  and a specialist neurosurgeon at a hospital? (I.e., can you fairly represent the skills in Grey's Anatomy: the RPG?) Can you do it 'on the fly', adding medical specialities as needed, but not creating them until play requires them?
2) Melee/Brawl skills. If you are good with a sword, you can probably use a mace pretty well, too; but unless you've trained wearing heavy armor, your efficiency is not so good with either weapon when wearing armor. Likewise unarmed martial arts skills also have some broad applicability to weapon-combat, but much less so when your mobility is hampered.
3) Languages... once you've mastered one non-native tongue, it's usually much easier to pick up another, especially the more closely related the language is.

Roger:
Well, the way I get it, the idea of Simulationism is to simulate life ("A role-playing game is a game of character development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called 'life.'" - from Ron Edward's article on Simulationism, quoted from the introduction to RuneQuest), and Simulationists are concerned with the aspect Exploration, and this includes the demand for that world to be realistic and logical (hence the acceptance of delays due to mechanical demands, for example).
I guess I got it wrong, so please correct me here. At any rate, my initial desire was to strive for maximum realism, and this remains standing. I used the term of Simulationism only to make things clearer, although it seems it only made them more vague.

Threlicus:
Thanks for the interest. Indeed, I would like to see myself coming with the math behind the web (the AST as I call it). :)
After the entire math for a generalised AST is there, everyone should be able to create such a web by their own desire. One should be able to create a model fairly similar to our reality (taking in consideration that every psychologist has his own ideas about how this web should look like; personally, I've been thinking about Gardner's Intelligencies as a starting point), or, should he so wish, create a model very much different from our reality - where there are psionic abilities, or mutant abilities, or anything else you want.

As for the other things you mentioned - I've been thinking along those lines, yes. Although I doubt it could be possible to generate new capabilities on the fly, due to the amount of various factors I'm thinking of using and the demand to logically connect them all with other cpabilities.

Another problem is where to draw the line. Walking is also a capability (I'm not quite sure whether it's an ability or a skill), but it's insane to require checks for walking, let alone grant experience for this - even if it's done by a computer.

Threlicus:
I'm afraid I slightly misunderstood you before regarding:

One thing I'd like to see is if you can come up with good heuristics for designing the web in the first place -- how much training each skill effects which other skills is obviously a very complex process, and while you can obviously just say that the web you have defines how it is in the world, it would be nice to be able to build something that people agree is a fair model of reality.

ODDin wrote:
Well, the way I get it, the idea of Simulationism is to simulate life ("A role-playing game is a game of character development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called 'life.'" - from Ron Edward's article on Simulationism, quoted from the introduction to RuneQuest), and Simulationists are concerned with the aspect Exploration, and this includes the demand for that world to be realistic and logical (hence the acceptance of delays due to mechanical demands, for example).
I guess I got it wrong, so please correct me here. At any rate, my initial desire was to strive for maximum realism, and this remains standing. I used the term of Simulationism only to make things clearer, although it seems it only made them more vague.

Hi ODDin,
  I think I count myself a Simulationist but "heaven in a game" to me involves a few other things.  I like this quote:

Simulationists are concerned with the aspect Exploration, and this includes the demand for that world to be realistic and logical (hence the acceptance of delays due to mechanical demands, for example).

P.S. Sorry for the typos and such.  Forgot there is no "edit" feature here.  My brain just cannot proof read in the little text entry box for some reason.

Thanks for the reply.

1) Tabletop wargames can teach tactics without being all that realistic. They just don't teach all the aspects of tactics; rather, they teach the way of thinking necessary to turn one into a tactician. For example, a simple comparison of power ratios doesn't take into account that tanks have weaker armour on their rear, and thus a successful attack from the rear of the tank has much more chances of destroying it than an equally successful attack from the front (this was implemented in Digital Reality's Desert Rats vs. Afrika Korps, for example). Surely you have to agree that the lack of this detail removes some tactical options, and may even result in a battle that was won in the game, but would have been lost in reality. This detail is one of many, and you have to agree that with every two details that are simplified into one, some specific (maybe very specific) tactical decisions and options are deprived from the players. The tabletop wargames had to simplify things in order to allow training, since all the details simply cannot be brought into consideration in a tabletop game. I am quite certain that if they could actually consider all these details without losing pace (and the lost of pace may, in some cases, be more of a loss of realism than the lack of a certain detail), they would have done so (which brings us to point number 2, later).
What I'm saying is that if in reality Z depeneds on factors A, B and C, and in the game A and B are merged together into X (while C turns into Y), it cannot possibly be described how A and B affect Z independently of one another. For example, if the well-known parameterms of Attack and Damage are together made Power, it cannot possibly be shown how one creature will almost almost always hit (due to high Attack) but will do very little damage, while another creature will hit extremely rarely, but when he does - he wouldn't need to do so again. They may have the same Power ratio (or not, if the Power isn't simply the average of Attack and Damage, but this doesn't matter), but they are quite different, and are used in different ways when it comes to tactics.
Bottom line - you cannot keep the same level of realism while removing details. It's always a trade-off, although I agree that sometimes the details at hand really mean very little (but they still do!). You cannot merge 2 details into one, or give up on details at all, and at the same time take into consideration the unique information each one provides.

2) Regarding pace: my way of keeping the pace is not of reducing the number of checks (this is more of a design-time problem than a run-time problem, to use programmist metaphors) but by enlisting a computer to do the job. Thus, the players and the GM simply need to look at the screen from time to time to know just what is going on (the behaviour of players and GM in such a situation deserves a whole discussion on its own right, so I shan't go into this here). Thus, the pace is kept, the game flows (at least, not more slowly than when playing with more regular rules), and the complicate mechanics are still working behind the curtain.

That said, I'm not saying that a game that doesn't involve horrifyingly complex mechanics is stupid, pointless and doesn't deserve playing - even from a Simulationist's point of view. I can play D&D and feel "inside" and feel things are going relatively realistically, even if I somehow gain a new wizard level after killing a bunch of orcs with a club, without using even a magic missile. Yes, I can perfectly enjoy this.
However, what I'm trying to achieve is a system that can be honestly realistic, in the most nit-picky way possible. And hopefully, I did manage to show that the only way to achieve realism in the end result is to achieve realism in all the details needed to calculate this end result.

ODDin,
  I like very much how you put your first point; especially on the loss of tactical options. I agree 100%. 
  Your computer assissited gaming idea sounds good.  Have you seen the game Aftermath by FGU that tried to get rather detailed with respect to man-to-man combat?  It didn't work well pace wise, but if programmed it would probably work very well.
 

I don't really see much in your design that specifically supports Sim play. What you have here is a mechanic wrapping a Technique that might be useful for a certain kind of play. I recommend reading ignoring the subjective, a poorly-named thread that clarified Simulationism in the Big Model. This is where Ron coined the term "constructive denial," and I consider this essential reading for anyone trying to understand Sim play. What are you trying to simulate? What fictional elements does your system protect and enforce?

You also should read the relevant patterns in Design Patterns of Successful RPGs, specifically the "Skill Tree" pattern. I suspect you've already seen this, as you and John Kirk both use "skill tree" to describe what is actually a directed graph, not a true tree in graph-theory parlance.

Here are what I believe are the deficiencies of your model:

• The false dichotomy between abilities and skills. Is surgery a skill or ability? I could certainly attempt a surgery without the medical background. Is speaking my native language a skill or ability? How about running?
• The mathematics. If you think your AST model will require a computer program to manage it, you should reconsider designing a table-top game with it. You're describing something like a neural net, with feedback between nodes. Consider that your "tree" will likely be a cyclic, directed graph due to synergies between different skills, then realize that the math will be a neverending feedback loop if your math isn't perfect. I don't want to have to invert a large matrix to get my game on.
• Most players don't care about "reality." They don't want a physics engine. They want rules to let them do cool stuff and tell cool stories. If there's a coherent Creative Agenda, they want tools to show off their game mastery (Gamism), to make a point about the game through their characters and the world (Narrativism), or to reinforce their collective ideals about the fiction (Simulationism).

It is within that last bullet point that I circle back to address your ideas of building a Sim engine. I suppose that a reality-simulator for character knowledge (your AST) does help players reinforce and defend their ideals about the fiction. It is, however, an extremely limited set of tools to support constructive denial.

Here's where you should proceed:

1. Most importantly, go to Actual Play and post about some game you've played where you saw the kind of play you want, or where the play specifically did not support the kind of play you want. Explain why it was good or bad, what you loved and hated.

2. Less importantly, describe here what kind of experience you want the players of your game to have. What does typical (theoretical) play look like over a few minutes. What does it look like over an evening? Over several evenings? What kind of things does the system reward?

Adam wrote:
I don't really see much in your design that specifically supports Sim play. What you have here is a mechanic wrapping a Technique that might be useful for a certain kind of play. I recommend reading ignoring the subjective, a poorly-named thread that clarified Simulationism in the Big Model. This is where Ron coined the term "constructive denial," and I consider this essential reading for anyone trying to understand Sim play. What are you trying to simulate? What fictional elements does your system protect and enforce?

Adam wrote:
You also should read the relevant patterns in Design Patterns of Successful RPGs, specifically the "Skill Tree" pattern. I suspect you've already seen this, as you and John Kirk both use "skill tree" to describe what is actually a directed graph, not a true tree in graph-theory parlance.

Adam wrote:
The false dichotomy between abilities and skills. Is surgery a skill or ability? I could certainly attempt a surgery without the medical background. Is speaking my native language a skill or ability? How about running?

Adam wrote:
The mathematics. If you think your AST model will require a computer program to manage it, you should reconsider designing a table-top game with it. You're describing something like a neural net, with feedback between nodes. Consider that your "tree" will likely be a cyclic, directed graph due to synergies between different skills, then realize that the math will be a neverending feedback loop if your math isn't perfect. I don't want to have to invert a large matrix to get my game on.

Adam wrote:
Most players don't care about "reality." They don't want a physics engine. They want rules to let them do cool stuff and tell cool stories. If there's a coherent Creative Agenda, they want tools to show off their game mastery (Gamism), to make a point about the game through their characters and the world (Narrativism), or to reinforce their collective ideals about the fiction (Simulationism).

It is within that last bullet point that I circle back to address your ideas of building a Sim engine. I suppose that a reality-simulator for character knowledge (your AST) does help players reinforce and defend their ideals about the fiction. It is, however, an extremely limited set of tools to support constructive denial.

ODDin wrote: I agree that there is a problem with deciding what's an ability and what's a skill, yes. However, how can you not divide capabilities into these 2 categories?

I do scale abilities according to their "innateness" - that is, how much is defined from birth. Also, I'm not saying that abilities solely depend on talent. An ability may be attempted without training - this doesn't mean the result will be all that good (unless the talent is very extraordinary and the ability depends a lot on inheritence). Let's take strength. There are "fibers" in the body which build the muscles (I don't know the exact English term, I'm translating from Hebrew on the fly, so sorry) which vary in amount from one person to the other (they also vary in types, but I'll keep things simple). If one has more "fibers" than the other, then his muscles are genetically stronger and more durable, and he has a much bigger potential. Also, for another example, according to my sports teacher, reaction time is one thing that almost isn't affected by training.

As for painting - it's an ability, as everyone can attempt to paint a good picture (if you know how to use a pencil/brush, that is). You won't be able to use specific techniques, maybe, since you simply won't know what they are, but you surely can try to paint.

I understand the world isn't black and white. But really, considering the fact that I do scale abilities regarding which one is more learning dependant and which one is less (theoretically, a completely learning dependant ability IS a skill, so you can actually call it a single category with a scale to it), I think the definition still manages to convey realism pretty well. Also, other factors provide even more differentiation between various skills and abilities.

Michael

P.S. Googling actually only brought up references of RPGs and coach systems, but maybe I just didn't sarch enough.