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.

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

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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

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.

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

Ron Edwards wrote: 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?

Joakim wrote: 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.

Joakim wrote: 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.

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! :-)

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.

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

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.

Just thought I'd chime in and ask a simple question regarding this:

Has anyone had problems in actual play with "unrealistic" results as a result of SA's?

Although it certainly is possible to get the big money SA bonus of 25 dice, I'd say that most of the time, it is significantly lower, and that folks are usually getting about 5 more dice, which then boil down to maybe 2 or 3 more successes in combat. An advantage, but not a ridiculous one.

Anyone have some examples of actual play where things have pushed the suspension of disbelief?

Chris

One of my gaming buddies once held off an army of Gol while the rest of the party evacuated several women and children from the castle. He was doing this as part of a mission for his country, and either four or all five of his SAs applied. He killed at least twenty-five Gol single-handedly as they rushed up the stairs two or even three at a time to their doom. That was pretty unbelievable, but it meant a lot to the character to have these women and children escape, and to finish the mission, and to save the skins of the rest of the party.

While this certainly pushed the suspension of disbelief, it was fittingly heroic for the situation, as the character fully expected to die at that point (and the player expected him to die as well), but due to some freakishly good die rolls on his part and some hideously bad die rolls on the part of the seneschal, the character survived and lived to tell the tale.

RE: Lyrax

And I bet he's still talkin' about it. Cool, huh.

Jake

Lyrax wrote: One of my gaming buddies once held off an army of Gol while the rest of the party evacuated several women and children from the castle. He was doing this as part of a mission for his country, and either four or all five of his SAs applied. He killed at least twenty-five Gol single-handedly as they rushed up the stairs two or even three at a time to their doom. That was pretty unbelievable, but it meant a lot to the character to have these women and children escape, and to finish the mission, and to save the skins of the rest of the party.

Actually i believe it is realistic that combat pool does add to total possible successes. Let's just put this into perspective.

We'll first create a character with spiritual attributes... lets say a middle aged woman, her spiritual attributes would be as follows.
Passion: her children: 3
Drive: To be a good mother:3
Luck:1

That's all we need for this scenerio and because this is a starting character, she wouldn't have more than 7 attribute points

While walking through the woods one day, a tree falls and pins Her two children, breaking one's leg. Instinctively she tries to move the tree to lift it off, Her stregnth of 3 isn't going to lift the log off, Even if she has 3 successes, she could lift the tree a bit, but then it would re settle in a different place. Leaving the children alone in the woods would not be an option, because there are wild animals in a medevil forest. The only option is to try. By putting her drive and passion in, she gets 6 mor dice for a total of 9, on a target of... let's say 15

How many times have you all heard of a mother lifting a car off a child?

Oh, and you allways roll bad lyrax

as the player of the character who pulled an horatio at the bridge thing that lyrax mentioned... I am still talking about it jake... how could I not!!!
and the way I figured that SA's work like that comes from my old wrestling days. I really wanted this spot on the team and I had been defending it all day through wrestle offs, I was so dang tired when I got to my last match I only picked the guy up and then pinned him due to sheer desire to win, I couldnt grasp a pencil afterwards but I picked the guy up and dropped him, then held him on the ground while he was fighting back as hard as he could... that to me is alot like SA's in action.

If you have experience in it, wrestling does give a lot of good insight to combat, especially when it comes to fatigue. I was really bad at it, but I have always had a healthy respect for a good grappler! I once went with my Dad to a clinic at the University of Iowa with Dan Gable. The guy he had help demonstrate moves with him was an olympic champion (I can't remember his name, but it was in the early to mid 80's.