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## Four Stat System.

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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:25 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113843335[/unixtime]]
> That's honestly the worst idea I've heard this year.
> People are only "an archer" in a board game. In a role playing game, people are only an archer if they happen to be holding a bow right now. Do you intend to somehow refund peoples' points when they leave their bow in the closet? Do you intend to penalize peoples' other abilities when they pick up a damned rock to throw?

Well quite simply you can add enough penalties to make certain actions not workable. If someone wants to be a melee flyer, then you can simply have them suffer a bunch of huge penalties when they use ranged weapons in the air to the point where they can't really do anything effective.
As for leaving the bow at home, that's their problem. If they paid points for bow proficiency, they're considered an archer and abilities need to be priced as though they were an archer.

> That's just not workable. People have a dynamic interaction with the world that cannot be sumarized effectively into combat roles for the purpose of making some sort of crazytastic algebraic formulae to determine the costs of individual upgrades. With this proposal, you are going to have situations where archers are going to buy extra points in battle axe skill to get themselves to count as a less archery oriented character category in order to save net points on their flight. Fvck that!

No, buying battleaxe doesn't really save you. If you have any ranged ability whatsoever, you pay more for flight. It'd be like that. If you already had flight and wanted to pick up archery, you'd pay more for archery. Anything else you had that didn't synergize with flying or archery wouldn't matter. And the same would be true of movement speed increases. If you wanted to be really fast, but you just used a melee weapon, you'd buy speed cheaper than a guy who didn't.
And that's the only fair way to do things. The problem with things now is that someone is either getting screwed or someone is gaining benefits for nothing. Flying is priced either for an ability for missile users or an ability for melee users. That's what a static cost does. It's priced for one or the other or somewhere inbetween. However, missile users get more out of it.

> This isn't a workable idea. It's an idea which is way too complicated for a non-computer based system, and one in which there are going to be algebraic breakpoints that allow you to make characters that are better than others all over the place.

Yeah, simplifying it would be difficult. And I wouldn't really want to try to get some formula. I was thinking of just having broad tags. Certain abilities give you the [ranged] tag for instance, and if you have the [ranged] tag, abilities with the [movement] tag cost you more points to get.

> The goal is to make a system in which people taking anything from Column A is actually roughly as powerful as anything else in Column A and then letting people take anything out of Column A.

The problem is that this totally ignores synergy. A guy who has incorporeality but can't attack while incorporeal is a lot weaker than a guy with incorporeality who can attack while incorporeal. And if you charge both the same amount, the guy who bought it and doesn't have attack forms for it is getting screwed.
Flying and movement boosts help ranged attackers more. So if you charge melee and ranged the same amount, you're actually screwing meleers, since they can't just go kill the dire bear by hovering over it pinging it with arrows.
And you need a sliding scale of some kind. It doesn't have to be that complex even, it can simply be binary. Either you have a certain ability or you don't and if you do, you have to pay more to combine the two. If you want to run fast and shoot arrows you've got to pay more than if you wanted to do either of those individually.
Abilities just can't exist in a vacuum, because in tactical combat, they don't. If you have a crappy attack and damage, getting karmic strike just isn't a big deal. If you are really good at those, getting karmic strike should be more expensive. And charging people the same to get it regardless of how good they are with it is a mistake.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:48 pm

> Catharz wrote:An AoE seems much harder to balance numerically than a multi-target affect, however.

It shouldn't, it's basically the same thing, except that it carries the nebulous disadvantage that it might hit someone or something that you don't want hit.

> Catharz wrote:If you're hitting a set # of foes, you could just divide the damage (which is beneficial when fighting a horde or orcs).
> If you're hitting a set # of squares, I really have no idea how effective you're going to be, even with environmental effects/damage.

Actually, in neither case do you know precisely how many enemies are going to be struck, although in the multi-target attack you are given a firm upper bound. In neither case do you have a lower bound save for zero.
If you shoot off your 7 person fear effect off at a group of six, you aren't hitting seven enemies. You are only hitting six. Similarly, if you throw it at one big bad guy, you are only hitting one target. If you throw a "giant torrential rain of confusion" at that one big enemy - you still only hit one target.
In either case, the most you actually strike is the number that there actually are - whether it be one, eight, or seventeen. So what you are doing is setting up an effect which is advantageous when used against groups larger than X, disadvantageous when used against groups smaller than X, and precisely equal against a group of size X (X may or may not be an integer, so there may be no actual possibility of having an ambivalent result).
However...

> Catharz wrote:you could just divide the damage

Oh no you don't. Remember that actual wounds are apportioned based on the absolute divergeance, not based on relative geometrical superiority. People take about half as many wounds if they pick up four points of resistance. Halving the damage has a totally different effect on someone with a 2000 damage attack as it does on someone with a 20 damage attack. People with a negative thirty damage attack will actually do more damage if you halve it.
Damage and resistances are never multiplied. By anything. Ever. You add or subtract from them, that's multiplication enough because the d20 is already inherently exponential.

> RC wrote:If you have any ranged ability whatsoever, you pay more for flight. It'd be like that.

And then we get into the whole Fantasy Hero bullshit of one player dropping a crossbow for the other player to pick up at the start of every game session. There is no way to enforce this shit.

> RC wrote:The problem with things now is that someone is either getting screwed or someone is gaining benefits for nothing.

And that problem does not go away with any system vaguely approaching the system you propose. It really doesn't.
Synergy is something that happens. It really does, and you can't prevent it as soon as the storytelling becomes open ended. If you live in a computer game, you can have the winged character never pick up a rock to throw, never use the other character's fire wand, and never carry another character, but in a Role Playing Game you can't make that claim.
Even if you could somehow make sure that a flying character could never be a ranged combatant because they didn't have any arms or something, that still wouldn't prevent another character with a bow from standing on their back long enough to get off a few shots or just plain be carried to the top of a nearby building where he could shoot unmolested. Synergy happens. If you try to price it so that players won't synergize within their own character, they'll just specialize characters and get their synergistic effects that way.
Damage Over Time effects are fundamentally more valuable if someone in your party has access to wall effects. That's an absolute fact. But simply charging someone more for their DOTs because they have Wall of Thorns or Wall of Stone or something solves nothing. There is absolutley no way to charge Shelkizor the Mad extra for Peanut Butter because Julia is probably going to make a character who has access to Jelly.
And because you can't charge extra for people having PB&J in all cases, you are "screwing someong or giving someone benefits for nothing" depending upon how you look at it. That's not within the power of a game system to address with cost concerns.
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You can partially address it with availability concerns, which was my point with Column A. If you put Solid Fog into an exclusive choice with Fire Cloud, then you can force people to use teamwork to get their synergy without directly screwing anyone over.
Remember that in this case, failure to acrue synergy would be a fact of the party, which means that they'd end up facing weaker opposition in exchange for being a weaker group. As such, the screwage wouldn't be so glaring.
But you really have to ask yourself if this sort of thing is even a problem. Is it? Is the fact that someone can put a Solid Fog into a Fire Cloud (thereby forcing enemies to actually suffer much of the damage of the DOT effect) actually a problem? Or is it in fact a feature, that some people will hook abilities together in a manner that makes them win sometimes?
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Mon Apr 18, 2005 11:44 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113864539[/unixtime]]
> And then we get into the whole Fantasy Hero bullshit of one player dropping a crossbow for the other player to pick up at the start of every game session. There is no way to enforce this shit.

That's easy to get around. You basically just impose restrictions on people who don't have ranged combat proficiencies. Basically it's the same as spellcasting. If you don't have proficiency (bow) you can't fire a bow at all. So dropping a crossbow for someone else to pick up is the same as dropping a wand and letting the fighter pick it up. yeah, he can carry it for you, but he can't use it.
While it might be unrealistic to totally deny someone ranged attacks, in the context of a game its necessary. Besides I could really care less if people with no training couldn't hit shit with a bow. Using a bow is actually pretty hard. If you haven't been trained to do it there's not much of a problem with just saying "you always miss" or just having the person do no real damage.

> And that problem does not go away with any system vaguely approaching the system you propose. It really doesn't.
> Synergy is something that happens. It really does, and you can't prevent it as soon as the storytelling becomes open ended. If you live in a computer game, you can have the winged character never pick up a rock to throw, never use the other character's fire wand, and never carry another character, but in a Role Playing Game you can't make that claim.

While this is true, I think we have to make some effort to curb synergy, otherwise all the balanced stat systems in the world won't help the game. If you can't stop synergy from being abusive, then game balance just won't happen. You just can't have synergizing choices and nonsynergizing choices, otherwise someone somewhere is getting screwed.
As far as the winged character having a rider, the simple way of dealing with that is to have a riding skill of some kind to ride a flying mount. So if you don't have that skill (thus giving you something with the [mobility] tag) you can't ride a flying mount effectively enough to attack from it. You're too off balance to cast spells or get good aim. And to get the riding skill, you have to pay the extra anti-synergy cost for having [ranged] and [mobility] abilities.

> Remember that in this case, failure to acrue synergy would be a fact of the party, which means that they'd end up facing weaker opposition in exchange for being a weaker group. As such, the screwage wouldn't be so glaring.

Yeah, that's doable, assuming that everything exists on a party level. I don't have that much of a problem with party synergy, but synergy within any one individual character needs to be controlled.
You quite simply shouldn't be able to make a better character because you chose abilities that go well together as opposed to choosing different abilities. That's the current problem with D&D right now. It's possible to use synergy to create shit that does stuff it's not supposed to do.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Fri Apr 22, 2005 7:00 pm

> RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1113867868[/unixtime]]You quite simply shouldn't be able to make a better character because you chose abilities that go well together as opposed to choosing different abilities.

This all sounds just a little bit crazy. Players shouldn't be allowed to improve their characters by choosing abilities that go well together? If we are going to do that, then we have to get rid of knights with lances charging on horseback, because mounted charges synergize well with using a lance and therefore shouldn't be an option.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Fri Apr 22, 2005 9:02 pm

> Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1114196411[/unixtime]]
> This all sounds just a little bit crazy. Players shouldn't be allowed to improve their characters by choosing abilities that go well together? If we are going to do that, then we have to get rid of knights with lances charging on horseback, because mounted charges synergize well with using a lance and therefore shouldn't be an option.

Not quite. But mounted combat needs to be balanced in some way with combat on the ground. You shouldn't get any special power because you chose to use mounted combat instead of being on the ground with a sword. You must have a weakness, and that weakness can't be something you can get around wtih more synergy.
Level has to mean something or it becomes meaningless. If you're level 10 you must be CR 10, otherwise you might as well not even be using a level system. You can't have some guys running around at level 10 who suck and others who are gods because they chose the right combination of abilities.
Synergy quite simply cannot be allowed to dominate the game. There is a point where specialization needs to hit diminishing returns or be capped. Since diminishing returns have very complex math in a system meant to go to high levels, It's probably better to just go linear and cap specialization at a certain level. So eventually you have as much sword skill as you can get and you have to start taking something else. The problem is that you have to make sure that whatever you take doesn't stack with your sword skill in any way.
And this is the difficult part of design. Everything must either have synergy or not have synergy. Because if you break that rule anywhere, then you are creating ways to get more power or less power than you should have.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Fri Apr 22, 2005 9:56 pm

So does the footman have to rebuild his character as soon as he mounts a pony?
Does the horseman gain and loose points as he leaves and enters buildings?
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:06 pm

> RC wrote:Because if you break that rule anywhere, then you are creating ways to get more power or less power than you should have.

No it sure as hell doesn't. In fact, even attempting to do as you describe is counterproductive, impossible, and insane. The correct way to balance things is to evaluate things when they are good, evaluate things when they are bad, and then attempt to price them based on how frequent those times should happen in a mythically "average" campaign.
Consider the simple Firebolt compared to the Fireball. There are lots of ways to attempt to balance the two, but let's first consider the advantages one has inherently over the other:
[*] The Fireball can hit more than one target (if and when there is more than one target to hit).
[*] The Firebolt can bypass furniture and allies to strike a specific enemy without collateral hits.
Now, most of the time, the fireball's advantage is better. This is because the BBEG has henchmen more often than he has hostages. So we make a rough guess as to how much more often the Fireball is going to be a better deal, and then we make the Fireball do less damage or have a longer recharge time, or whatever, such that it "pays" for the additional utility in some way.
And that's how we do it. We now have a situation in which when you are fighting a single enemy, you'd rather have the Firebolt. And when you are fighting a single enemy who is holding a little girl, you'd way rather have the Firebolt. But if there are a few enemies together, the Fireball is what you want all the way.
We do not attempt to somehow screw the fireball users over when their attack is "synergizing" with the fact that they are facing a bunch of enemies. That road leads to madness.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Apr 23, 2005 1:11 am

I think you misunderstood me Frank. I'm not saying that all styles should be numerically equal. I'm saying that all styles should have specific disadvantages and should not synergize with other styles.
For instance, here's a simple example from D&D.
Three class abilities.
-Base attack bonus
-ability to sneak attack
-ability to cast magic missile or fireball.
The first two synergize with each other well. That is one gets better by taking the other. The 3rd doesn't synergize with anything. And that's bad.
Either you can have everything produce synergy or nothing produce synergy. You cannot have it inbetween where some combinations produce killer combos and the others produce lots of unrelated abilities.
And that's the problem it's the same kind of action to get sneak attack and use your BaB, but it's a different kind of action entirely to cast magic missile or fireball, one that doesn't benefit in the slightest from sneak attack or base attack.
You can't have some abilities that stand alone and others that improve other abilities. Things just won't work that way.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Murtak » Sat Apr 23, 2005 7:21 am

> RandomCasualty wrote:Level has to mean something or it becomes meaningless. If you're level 10 you must be CR 10, otherwise you might as well not even be using a level system. You can't have some guys running around at level 10 who suck and others who are gods because they chose the right combination of abilities.

Sure you can. In my opinion it is not needed to have everyone be at CR 10. What matters is that you have a broad selection at CR 10 and absolutely noone at CR 15. The occasional CR 5 concept does not worry me at all, unless there is no way to play a given character concept at CR 10.
To put it another way, imagine power as a curve. Left to right you have different classes, class combinations or character concepts. And top to bottom you measure power. Ideally you would want a flat curve, meaning that each character concept is equal in power. Obviously the less flat the curve becomes the more out of balance the different characters are. But that can be fine if you have enough character concepts at the top end of the curve to fit every character you might want to play. In that case you can just disregard all the weak concepts and be done with it.
So what I am concerned with is that there be no single huge spikes in the class curve. These spikes elevate the cutoff point and make me abandon scores of character concepts. The valleys only make me abandon a single concept. So I am concerned with the cleric archer, the druid, the DC 500 wizard. I am not concerned with the bard/cleric/ravager.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Sat Apr 23, 2005 8:23 am

Could y'all take discussions about level-systems somewhere else. I seriously don't give a fvck here, because the SAME system is actually not level-based. It's skill-based.
Stats, Active Skills, Backgrounds, and Abilities are handed out separately and directly. There's no particular reason why any particular player would actually have an equal pile of all four as another particular player from a different game.
In a level system, if a player goes out and marries a princess, he gets a lot of governmental and financial power which he either gets without an associated level or is forced to spend his next level on it. In the SAME system, if the player marries the princess, the rewards for that adventure are going to include a bunch of backgrounds and that's the end of it. It neither subtracts from the player's ultimate knowledge of magic (by using up finite level-abilities) nor circumvents the character's current power measurements (by being a form of power that isn't counted against his level).
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Murtak
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Murtak » Sat Apr 23, 2005 8:40 am

Levels, skills, class abilities, whatever - RC was talking about synergy between abilities and how to ensure every character stays at a similar level of power. It does not matter if sneak attack synergizes with BAB or jump with hide, the principle remains the same.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Sat Apr 23, 2005 5:07 pm

> Murtak wrote:It does not matter if sneak attack synergizes with BAB or jump with hide, the principle remains the same.

...or Fireball with having multiple opponents, or Earthbind with having a friend who knows Cloud Kill. The principle is inane.
Let's say that you have an attack that does extra damage if you go first, and less damage if you don't. Like OA Focus effects. This "synergizes" with having a high Stealth ability in that you are more likely to go first. But if your stealth is negated, your synergy is negated as well.
The "best case" scenario for the Strike First, Strike Last ability is that you go first. Some other abilities you can have (stealth, improved initiative, teleportation, telescopic vision) can make that happen more often, but none of them will make it happen all the time. And that's the important thing to remember, all this talk of "synergy" is actually just talking about having your powers be more likely to go off when they are in the beneficial column than otherwise.
And you know what? I can't conceive of how I could possibly care less than I do right now. When you make the First Strike Bonus attack, you figure that the player is going to go first sometimes, and not go first other times. And you price it accordingly. Sometimes it's going to turn out that you overpriced or underpriced something because its gravy turns on more or less often than you figured it would. Then you can tweak it at that time.
But trying to tweak each individual power's cost based on how often you think that player is going to be able to work his way into using it well is the road of madness. Since the final say on how often you'll be able to use any of these powers rests with the GM, you might as well just say that the GM simply assigns every player a list of abilities.
As soon as you attempt to normalize for how often peoples' abilities are going to come up in a specific game, you may as well have no system at all.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Apr 23, 2005 7:46 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1114276039[/unixtime]] When you make the First Strike Bonus attack, you figure that the player is going to go first sometimes, and not go first other times. And you price it accordingly. Sometimes it's going to turn out that you overpriced or underpriced something because its gravy turns on more or less often than you figured it would. Then you can tweak it at that time.

The problem is you have two choices as far as pricing it. Either it's priced based on a character with all the synergy feats or it's priced against a character without the synergy feats, and in either case, someone is either getting boned or making away with free power. And that's unavoidable in a static cost system.
Either you need to make the first strike ability work only on base initiaitive, thus eliminating synergy, or you need to charge more for combining the two, since you're getting a bigger benefit since the sum of the two parts exceed the power of each independently.
And if you dont' do that, you're going to run into a lot of imbalances. Synergy leads to killer combos. And characters then either have those combos or don't have them. If you have them you're awesome, if you don't then you suck. Unless the strategy of character building is going to be a feature within the system, synergy has to be contained as best as possible.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Sat Apr 23, 2005 8:55 pm

> RC wrote:The problem is you have two choices as far as pricing it.

No, you have infinite different ways of pricing it. You can price it based on PCs using any of a number of clever tricks to go first in the battles they engage in, you can price it based on the DM using any of a number of crazy things to make them go second. You can price it anywhere in between.
And that's just it. Pricing it based on any particular set of subsequent DM or Player choices is possible, but pricing it in terms of all of them is not.
So please, shut the hell up about it. There's absolutely nothing that can be done about the basic "problem" you are taking issue with - that conditional abilities are inherently unbalanced depending upon what the conditions actually end up being in a specific game, and that those conditions are up to the Players and the GM, and not the game designer, to determine.
Punishing PCs for getting favorable conditions out of their own actions just encourages a state of disengagement and despair. It's the opposite of fun, and it doesn't even make things more balanced.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Murtak » Sat Apr 23, 2005 9:38 pm

RC is right in that you need to decide what you are going to base your assumptions on, no matter if you are balancing feats, classes, skills or backgrounds.
I just don't agree with balancing towards the low end. That ends up with having to artificially nerf 90% of your freshly made system. But shaving off the few highest peaks in your power curve towards the rest of the options - the cleric archers and 3.5 druids of the system down to the rogue, or 3.0 druid or whereever you want to set your default power level - can be a healthy thing.
Where exactly you put that cutoff point after which you adjust abilities is entirely arbitrary though.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Thu Apr 28, 2005 7:29 pm

I've been wondering about variable statistics as a way to gauge the 'realistic deadlyness' of a gaming world.
By having static DCs for 'environmental' dangers, you can shift a game from realistic (peasants sometimes kill great warriors, a fall from a horse can paralyze) to DargonballZ.
But then I started thinking about how you would apply the DCs. I'm sure Frank created his system with this in mind already, but I'll go over it anyway.
A character's defense would have to apply to something like a fall, creating the odd situation where a 'fall' rolls to 'hit' a character.
Without that you'd have silly things like cats & elephants falling out of 10th-story windows, then having the cats go splat and the elephants walk away.
So, with that in mind I was wondering what some good base 'agilities' and 'strengths' for environmental effects would be, like falling, wind, cave-ins, and so forth.
Although the idea of a storm having an Agility and Strength seems a little odd, it seems to make its effects perfectly tuneable.
For example: 'Wind' would have a very high 'agility' (it is freaking hard to roll with or dodge the wind), but a low 'strength,' or at least a low base damage if you're using variable base damages (it is unlikely to break your neck).
A "Fall," on the other hand, would have a very low agility: I can't tell you how many Kung Fu masters I've seen ignore falls of hundreds of feet--Just kidding.
But a fall would have a very high 'Strength.'
The end result is (hopefully) that cats can survive falls and elephants aren't easily blown away (athough those bodies make good airfoils, or so I hear).
So, if we're to assume a baseline of Zero, what wold be some good Agility and Strength scores?
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Thu Apr 28, 2005 10:35 pm

Here's the deal on falls in the real world:
The amount of damage they deal out is proportional to the ratio between a creature's mass and surface area. So if you made a creature be the same size, but reduced it's mass, it takes less damage from falls (ex.: Tumbleweeds bounce around with no particular ill effects all the time because they are hollow). Contrarywise, building the same creature in a more dense form will make it suffer more from falls (ex.: snails do not fair well from falls when contrasted with cockroaches).
But here's where the cube square law comes in: if you double all the dimensions of a creature, it's mass gets multiplied by eight, while its surface area is multiplied by four. So the same creature takes way more damage from a fall when it is full sized than it does at half size. Ex1: You can toss children off the roof all day and people will call you a monster, but actually the kids are probably going to be fine; pulling the same trick with college students will result in injury or death. Ex2: If you dump a bag full of mice out of a skyscraper, the only deaths will be from heart attacks; while elephants can't even run for fear of shattering their legs.
Now that the physics lesson is over, what does that mean for game mechanics, which are manifestly obviously incapable of keeping track of character's surface area and mass and generating some formula every time people fall any meaningful distance? It means that we need to make a simplistic formula that works well enough.
An example that springs immediately to mind is to have a damage value that is based on the distance you've fallen and your own strength. This would mean that your strength essentially cancels out of the equation, so the only variables are Distance, Agility, and Earth Resistance. This would be more "heroic" than "realistic", in that a sufficiently skillful elephant could leap off a castle wall and land running - which is totally impossible. But it would alleviate the obvious absurdities of mice detonating on contact with the ground or trolls walking off of buildings because they don't particularly care about the amount of damage such a fall could possibly inflict.
Unfortunately, that sort of compromise does make Behdra the Berserker suffer from falls to a comparable extent to Celedir the Doomsinger, because they have the same agility scores - even though Behdra is supposed to be "tough" and Celedir is supposed to be "fragile". That's an unfortunate pixelation which I blame on the fact that the system does not distinguish between having a high strength "because you are a badass" and having a high strength "because you are a mastadon".
I don't see any way around that.
---
If you wanted a more "realistic" method, you'd double tap peoples' strength scores on the damage calculation. This would mean that characters with a higher strength score would actually suffer more wounds than characters with lower strengths. This would largely cancel out for higher level characters, since their ability to raise strength is actually tied to their raising of Agility, so falls would remain roughly constantly wounding at all levels.
But then you'd rather be Celedir than Behdra, which is even farther away from design goals for PCs. As such, I don't think it's worth doing, even though it causes the system to model dropping ants and elephants more accurately.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Thu Apr 28, 2005 11:02 pm

Assuming they're all low-level ants and elepants, I don't see any inconsistancy.
And I have no problem with a high-level elephant dodging the ground's vengeful smite.
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User3
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Sat Mar 25, 2006 11:09 pm

I'm cointinuing with fleshing out a SAME system, and I've basically decided to model all skill checks as 'attacks.'
What I'm wondering about is how I'm going to model certain opposed skills. Specifically, sneakyness.
Modeling an illusionist's Invisibility is simple. Just your garden variety mental attack. Modeling a rogue's sneak, however, is a little more difficult. How can I reasonably model what is effectively an agility-based skill as an attack on the mental attributes without upsetting the careful balance of the system?
Is it even worth trying?
...
Some more info:
The game system, over-all, is going to be pretty similar to the Disgaea one. Rank (although not based on minions) will be the basis of all checks, with the addition of an attribute in the normal SAME fashion. Ability scores will be purchased at character creation out of a pool of 8 points, with a max score of 4.
Actual skills will be binary, and somewhat root-shaped. A character will have the option of persuing any three such 'roots,' each one being drawn from a group representing the basic archtypes of 'fighter,' 'thief,' and 'magic-user.'
This doesn't mean that every character is a fighter/thief/magic user. Firstly, to get the 'knock' spell you'd need the 'mage' version of the thief tree.
Secondly, a character can choose to persue one or two trees to the exclusion of all others. This makes for a more focused character, but because of the binary nature of the skills, actual (non-tactical) power isn't any greater.
I have yet to finish coding (Yes, I'm writing this in Scheme) a single tree, but I'm looking at 'mage-flavored,' 'shapeshifter- and psionic-flavored,' 'nonmagical-flavored,' and 'evil-flavored' versions of all three, just because these tend to be some of the most popular archtypes.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Mar 25, 2006 11:45 pm

> Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1143328173[/unixtime]]
> Modeling an illusionist's Invisibility is simple. Just your garden variety mental attack. Modeling a rogue's sneak, however, is a little more difficult. How can I reasonably model what is effectively an agility-based skill as an attack on the mental attributes without upsetting the careful balance of the system?
> Is it even worth trying?

I think you probably could so long as the ability in question isn't able to actually kill your opponent. It's not exactly good form, but I don't think it'd entirely unbalance the system, unless you started having true damaging attacks or attacks that incapacitate that do that.
As for it being worth trying, I can think of a few abilities, namely stealth that you'd want to cross the line on for flavor reasons, but you certainly don't want to make a habit of it and everyitme you do cross the line between stats you have to really work it carefully.
Basically I'd think if you made stealth less of a combat ability and more of a noncombat ability, it'd be real easy to do. Generally I wouldn't cross the line on any combat ability, but noncombat abilities probably can without much fuss.
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PhoneLobster
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by PhoneLobster » Sun Mar 26, 2006 7:15 am

Why is it agility based?
Why not make it a mental stat thing anyway. After all hiding can easily be described as being as much or more about knowing where to be and how to move as it is being physically able to move more accurately or quickly than the next guy.
Realism justifications behind the way game mechanics function are remarkably flexible. Do what you need to do with the stats THEN justify it with an explanation of the true nature of the art of hiding. That is if any justification beyond "thats how the system needs it to work for all our sakes" is actually required.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sun Mar 26, 2006 7:22 pm

> PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1143357319[/unixtime]]Why is it agility based?
> Why not make it a mental stat thing anyway. After all hiding can easily be described as being as much or more about knowing where to be and how to move as it is being physically able to move more accurately or quickly than the next guy.
> Realism justifications behind the way game mechanics function are remarkably flexible. Do what you need to do with the stats THEN justify it with an explanation of the true nature of the art of hiding. That is if any justification beyond "thats how the system needs it to work for all our sakes" is actually required.

Well, the idea is that rogues are supposed to be good at hiding and rogues are supposed to be agile. Hiding is generally about being fast and getting behind cover, leaping up onto the ceiling or whatever cool move. I think agility makes more sense.
Though the more I think about it, you could probably make it agility versus agility. Generally the more agile characters tend to be the most aware anyway, so making perception an agility thing could work too.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by User3 » Sun Mar 26, 2006 7:33 pm

> RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1143330351[/unixtime]]
> I think you probably could so long as the ability in question isn't able to actually kill your opponent. It's not exactly good form, but I don't think it'd entirely unbalance the system, unless you started having true damaging attacks or attacks that incapacitate that do that.
> As for it being worth trying, I can think of a few abilities, namely stealth that you'd want to cross the line on for flavor reasons, but you certainly don't want to make a habit of it and everyitme you do cross the line between stats you have to really work it carefully.
> Basically I'd think if you made stealth less of a combat ability and more of a noncombat ability, it'd be real easy to do. Generally I wouldn't cross the line on any combat ability, but noncombat abilities probably can without much fuss.

Stealth has both (pre/post)-combat and out of combat utility.
An ambusher has the advantage of initiative, and being able to make like a ninja when combat turns against you is also an advantage.
I agree that it probably wouldn't be too unbalanced.
In this case it would (I suppose) be an agility attack dodged by elan. Which would mean that a focused thief-type would always be better at sneaking than detecting other sneakers. I'm not sure that I like that, but it does make some amount of sense. Certainly it fits with the low-level D&D paradigm.

> PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1143357319[/unixtime]]Why is it agility based?
> Why not make it a mental stat thing anyway. After all hiding can easily be described as being as much or more about knowing where to be and how to move as it is being physically able to move more accurately or quickly than the next guy.
> ...

That also makes sense. Unfortunately, it has the side effect of making your garden variety cutpurse has to spread himself rather thin.
I'm already planning on giving a lot of utility skills out to the mental attribues (diplomacy-type, bluff-type), and one of the problems I'm running into with the thief skills is that none of them make sense based on strength.
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by squirrelloid » Sat Jul 01, 2006 2:34 am

I finally stopped lurking because i wanted to comment on the balance of the system.
First, i think SAME is probably one of the most balanced systems i've seen. But that doesnt mean there isn't optimal character design.
In particular, in any attack/damage stat pair, it is always to your advantage to have a higher attack than damage stat.
Consider the change in expected damage dealt (before soak) given some relative change in targets agility. Base damage will be taken to refer to all damage not accrued from rolling higher than the target difficulty (eg, weapon damage + strength for a melee weapon).
Calculation:
For every 2 we exceed the target DC of 8 + agil, we add 1 damage. Since the relevant values here are not opponents agil and our agil, its the difference in agilities, we'll simply consider n to be the case where attacker's agility = defender's agility. Similarly, n-k reduces the attacker's agility relative to the defenders, and n+k increases it.
Expectation, E[x] = sum(x*P(x)) summed over all n for discreet events.
For a miss, x = 0 (no damage dealt), and P(x) = P(d20+k < 8) where k is the deviation from n = n (where -k from above is represented by k being negative). For k=0, P(d20 < 8) is .35. Of course, since this is guaranteed to multiply to zero, it won't effect the calculation.
Non-misses can be thought of in two ways. As its easier to explain the constant term when we think about them in chunks of two, i'll do so, and then simplify. Each set of two numbers has a .1 chance of being rolled. They also have an associated bonus to damage, r. So for k = 0, d20 = 8,9 has a +0 to damage; 10,11 has a +1; and so forth. Thus for each of these little chunks the x is expressed as r+Base, and they happen with probability .1. The full term is .1(r+Base)
Sometimes we'll have a tail value without its associated pair. eg, 20,21 would be +6 in the k = 0 situation. But 21 is impossible. In this case it happens with 1/2 the probability. For ease of mathematics, we can break up all our terms into 1/2 of their full terms, and treat them all as half terms.
So out E[x] = .05(r1+Base) + .05(r1+Base) + .05(r2+Base) + .05(r2+Base) + .05(r3+Base) +....05(rn+Base). This is simplifiable to .05(r1+r1+2r2+...+rn)+ P(hit)*Base. This is because all those .05s sum up to the probability of hitting (proof by construction).
Now that we can calculate the E[x] for a given agility disparity, we can calculate the expected gains from improving that agility disparity in your favor. I've provided E[x] for n-2 to n+3 in the table below for various Base Damage values.
Base n-2 n-1 n n+1 n+2 n+3
10 6.75 7.5 8.3 9.1 9.95 10.8
11 7.3 8.1 8.95 9.8 10.7 11.6
12 7.85 8.7 9.6 10.5 11.45 12.4
13 8.4 9.3 10.25 11.2 12.2 13.2
14 8.95 9.9 10.9 11.9 12.95 14
15 9.5 10.5 11.55 12.6 13.7 14.8
20 12.25 13.5 14.8 16.1 17.45 18.8
25 15 16.5 18.05 19.6 21.2 22.8
30 17.75 19.5 21.3 23.1 24.95 26.8
35 20.5 22.5 24.55 26.6 28.7 30.8
40 23.25 25.5 27.8 30.1 32.45 34.8
The difference in a row between n+k and n+k+1 is the expected increase in damage from increasing your agility by 1 point given initial agility disparity k.
For comparison, the expected increase in damage (per swing) for increasing strength by 1 point is equivalent to the P(hit). P(hit) varies from .55 to .8 across the examined agility spread.
Thus for most realistic base damage values, increasing agility is better than increasing strength in terms of the expected damage inflicted (before soaking).
This implies the Agility/Elan character is a better tank than the Strength/Moxie character, and should outperform the Str/Agil and the Moxie/Elan character because they can target the weak abilities of either and are defended optimally against both.
Edited for table formatting. Correction - is there any way i can put spaces in there (or tabs?) so that you can actually read the table?
Also apologies on the lengthy E[x] explanation, but i didn't want to confuse anyone.
-Squirrelloid
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Username17
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### Re: Four Stat System.

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Post by Username17 » Sat Jul 01, 2006 5:46 pm

> squirreloid wrote:
> Thus for most realistic base damage values, increasing agility is better than increasing strength in terms of the expected damage inflicted (before soaking).

But... there is soaking. There really are two d20s being rolled. Rolling below threshold on the first d20 negates your entire attack, but your opponent rolling above threshold on the soak roll actually negates the entire attack as well.
Let's look at the extreme case of an attack that lands oly on a 20 and is soaked on any roll but a 1. It does an average of 1/400th of a point of damage. If you increase your Agility by 1, it hits on a 19 or 20, and thus the average damage is doubled to .005. If you instead increased Strength by 1, it still only lands 1 in 20 ties, but it now isn't soaked on a 1 or 2 - which still doubles the expected damage to .005 damage per attack.
Now let's look at the more complicated (and likely) case where characters hit on an 11+ and their attacks get soaked on an 11+. That's a 50% chance of landing a blow (which in turn is made up of a 1 in 10 of doing base damage, a 1/10 of doing +1 damage, a 1 in 10 of +2 damage, a 1 in 10 of +3 damage, and a 1/0th of +4 damage), which does an average of 1.5 damage hitting at base (1.8 at +1, 2.1 at +2, 2.45 at +3, and 2.8 at +4). Per attack, that's an average of 1.065 wounds per attack (minimum 0, maximum 7).
If you increase the chance to hit by 1, you have a 55% chance of hitting, and pick up a 1 in 20 chance of doing damage +5 (average damage 3.2). That's 1.225 wounds average per attack. If you increase the strength by 1, you still have the same 5 ways you can hit (+0, +1, +2, +3, and +4), but now they do 1.8, 2.1, 2.45, 2.8, and 3.2 damage respectively. That's actually 1.235 - so adding damage is a tiny bit better at this point than adding to-hit is. Not much, it's only a difference of 1 percent of one average wound per attack, but the difference is totally there.
BTW, there aree a number of balance points where adding to-hit is liitle better than adding damage, and if you add wound penalties adding to-hit gets substantially better than adding damage (and if you add "staggering blows", damage becomes substantially better than to-hit).
The Soak roll really is just as capable of eliminating incoming damage as the to-hit roll is.
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