Removing quantitative descriptions

[J1M]

And how exactly does someone who hasn't played D&D for 15 years know that vorpal in the description means a magical enchantment with a chance of an instant beheading?

What is this next gen faggotry?

In the days of Bards Tale, you knew you had something special when you'd go to sell a "item i - Sword" and the shop keeper would offer you 10000gp off the bat.

In those old days, you had a guy with an identify spell, or found an identify scroll, or paid a shop keeper 25gp, and the result would be:

"This is a <vorpal sword of the rpg codex> . It is worth [ 2000 gp ]:
+10% beheading vs trolls
+25% resistance to trannies/nazis
-25% buggery"

You clearly don't understand what this thread is about. Go to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

 

[crufty]

Perhaps :D

On one hand, what if we ask more of the player?

On the other, what happens if they don't like it?

That is the real rub, right? The fear? Force someone into your world and they may reject it. So like any gameplay element, maybe it has to be done right?

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/94 ... _large.png

 

[J1M]

Perhaps :D

On one hand, what if we ask more of the player?

On the other, what happens if they don't like it?

That is the real rub, right? The fear? Force someone into your world and they may reject it. So like any gameplay element, maybe it has to be done right?

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/94 ... _large.png

It's not asking more of the player.

It's not about whether the player likes it or not.

It's not about doing it right.

You really should read the rest of the thread before commenting.

 

[crufty]

The way I look at it, rpg mechanics are a series of tests vs ability, and items are an ability modifier. The actual ability modifier does not need to be described as a number to have meaning.

Part of doing it right means not penalizing failure. Not sure how this would translate, but as a thought experiment suppose you have a PC w/perception as an attribute, and pick pocket as a skill (or class ability etc).

A perception type attribute, or lore, or perhaps perception*skill, can be used to communicate test difficulty. This test is easy. This test is hard. So when a player commands his PC to pickpocket, perhaps this percpetion test result is displayed on screen...player clicks picpocket button, mouses over guard, gets a "???/easy pickpocket/hard pickpocket" etc.

Player clicks on a guard. PC walks over and...the pickpocket test is performed.

Now, lets suppose the player fails the pickpocket test--now, instead of the guard noticing, we can say "You don't think you can do this...really pickpocket?" Player clicks no, and we pretend like the action never happened (which is why Captain Kirk always lands the punch). If by chance the pickpocket was a success, by all means reward the player with the foozle key, X gp or whatever.

If the player clicks "yes", pickpocket anyway, well...then they sow what they reap.

When converting from a 'numbers' based system to a descriptive system, more needs to be changed then simple IntToStr(intType,int) as String...and it will ask more of a player.


edit--and free them too. The challenge is to move players, and designers, away from fretting about which sword is marginally better then which sword--and more onto developing preferences. Developing expertise in katana's over daggers, in long blades over short, and away from caring (in terms of mechanics) if the katana pommel is engraved ivory or simple leather and more about caring if the simple leather matches the status of the nobility of the PC.

 

[Unradscorpion]

and free them too. The challenge is to move players, and designers, away from fretting about which sword is marginally better then which sword--and more onto developing preferences. Developing expertise in katana's over daggers, in long blades over short, and away from caring (in terms of mechanics) if the katana pommel is engraved ivory or simple leather and more about caring if the simple leather matches the status of the nobility of the PC.

If weapons are rarer, then there won't be any "fretting about which sword is marginally better".

Also, stats build preferences, your character may use that critical x3 by building up his critical range, but when you only have "a sharp sword" as a description, there will just be LARPing and dressing up your character so that your sword matches your shin guards.

 

[crufty]

Also, stats build preferences, your character may use that critical x3 by building up his critical range, but when you only have "a sharp sword" as a description, there will just be LARPing and dressing up your character so that your sword matches your shin guards.

well...different games for different folks. Preferences drive stats, vs stats drive preferences, not sure what that means.

I'm not saying games that have long sword, +3 are better or worse. But the Chosen One goes up against a horde of orcs. Slaughters them all. That means there should be a horde of orc swords, various tattered clothes, cloaks, etc. Do they really all need individual stats? No! Just tattered and bloody orcish leather armor. Period.

PC wears it, he should gain the 'stinky' trait.

For me, I'm more interested right now in a game that disposes of the +3. Long sword. Glowing Long Sword. If there is a Long Sword with an bone pommel, then that bone pommel must have an in game effect or its just fluff. Bone armor--is that an alignment shift? yeah, why not. complete the outfit and get a 'menacing look' perk. Should the player know about that in advance? Unsure.

That to me--the combination of large amounts of small rules, makes for an interesting sandbox world. An crpg should not just be "P)ickup item, A)ttack Monster or T)alk to Npc..."

 

[Unradscorpion]

Also, stats build preferences, your character may use that critical x3 by building up his critical range, but when you only have "a sharp sword" as a description, there will just be LARPing and dressing up your character so that your sword matches your shin guards.

well...different games for different folks. Preferences drive stats, vs stats drive preferences, not sure what that means.

I'm not saying games that have long sword, +3 are better or worse. But the Chosen One goes up against a horde of orcs. Slaughters them all. That means there should be a horde of orc swords, various tattered clothes, cloaks, etc. Do they really all need individual stats? No! Just tattered and bloody orcish leather armor. Period.

PC wears it, he should gain the 'stinky' trait.

For me, I'm more interested right now in a game that disposes of the +3. Long sword. Glowing Long Sword. If there is a Long Sword with an bone pommel, then that bone pommel must have an in game effect or its just fluff. Bone armor--is that an alignment shift? yeah, why not. complete the outfit and get a 'menacing look' perk. Should the player know about that in advance? Unsure.

That to me--the combination of large amounts of small rules, makes for an interesting sandbox world. An crpg should not just be "P)ickup item, A)ttack Monster or T)alk to Npc..."

+3 swords are stupid, but a sword whose stats are open to read is another story, you can call it whatever you want, as long as you don't touch the crunch.

Alignment shift for wearing an armor? Monolux, is that you?

Yes, small rules should be everywhere, but obfuscating mechanics is dumbfuckery.

 

[DraQ]

It would make sense only in a game that would drop the whole anti-realism thing that is so popular in cRPGs. Otherwise you need numbers because you don't get any sensible results from your actions.
If you can cut off a limb of any un-armoured person with any sensible sword when hitting in a correct way, then the quantitative become unnecessary.
If that person has 60hp and the sword just does 1D10 damage, then the quantitative descriptions are necessary because the system doesn't make sense and the only reasonable thing one can do is number-crunching.

This. Is possibly the smartest fucking thing said in this thread.

RPGs need their whole numerical mechanics exposed, because RPGs are fucking retarded in terms of mechanics.
If RPGs start to care about their mechanics having some ties with reality instead of being some zany abstract shit, and no, it doesn't preclude presence of old frail men casting fireballs, beings from other planes or huge fucking dragons, the detailed numerical descriptions will not only become obsolete, but an obstacle in the way of more interesting gameplay.

Yet games become easier and easier, while at the same time hiding *the numbers*, how come?

People who should be interested in improving the genre are living in the past, so the market is being dominated without much effort by those who make games 'by retards for retards'.

A system can be arbitrarily complex, but the outcomes are always few and simple and can be expressed as numbers and percentages whose understanding is not a problem for a person. A flavorful description is a huge plus, but quantitative descriptions are essential for proper planning.

Sigh.

I imagine, the game could just choose the ending scene as a function of character's build determining probability vector of possible outcomes, and a random variable immediately after chargen. I also imagine such game would be sorely lacking in terms of gameplay.

Before I explain further, I have a question to you - what is mechanics for?

Theoretically, you don't need mechanics in a cRPG, you could just explicitly define probability of every outcome in every circumstances. Theoretically. In practice this would require too much work and memory to be feasible, plus it would never account for any possibility not directly predicted by the devs, so instead of explicitly defining probabilities in every point of our RPG's statespace, the problem is broken down into chunks and rules and functions are set up governing what happens in game. Instead of meticulously cataloguing all the outcomes, the rules generate them on the fly. Typical RPG mechanics is very coarse, though - perfectly suited for limited computational capabilites of a bunch of nerds rolling dice, but not really simulating a lot of stuff.
By being coarse it's pretty rigid - imagine I pick up some item using it to shield myself from enemy blows - if the makers didn't code the item's defensive properties and the way it reacts to being violently smashed, the game won't know what to do. In a PnP RPG a GM can handle such situation on the fly, alas, cRPGs tend to lack GM. This is the moment when game tells us that "LOL U CANT" and we start to bitch about railroading. But what if instead of coding everything's properties as everything else, we would code simple stuff like mass, material, shape for every object and specify properties of those materials? We could assign 'sharpness' to edges and vertices of our models, or even let software assign those values based on geometrical criteria and just fine tune them later on. We could assign physical properties to materials, so that game could determine how objects react to whatever they fate might be. This way everything in the game is simultaneously a shield, a weapon, a projectile and whatever the fuck else anyone may imagine - not only that, the devs no longer need to actually assign much stats to their creations - if the mechanics is good, and, say, longsword resembles historical ones, it should behave reasonably like a longsword in game, provided the characters can swing it right.

Now for the fun part:
You know what the HP attrition is? Do you like it?
If you answered yes to the latter question, shoot yourself.
No, seriously, you don't deserve to be alive.

HP attrition is possibly the most boring, counter-intuitive, unrealistic and generally retarded mechanics to ever disgrace a computer game. Yet, it is widespread.
Now I propose something different and actually interesting: let us have a skeleton, a set of vertices and edges supporting character's model. It makes it easier to animate too. Assign properties to each bone determining how much do you need to fuck it up physically to sever it. Assign soft collision shell with similarly determined parameters to the mesh representing character's body. Finally, put some collision volumes inside, representing vital areas in the body - assign probabilities to them that getting penetrated or hit with sufficiently high impulse fucks them up royally. Maybe allow them to cumulate on subsequent hits. You now have a character that can be properly dismembered or critted without even needing HPs. Add some armour as collision shells and assigned materials around the model to prevent damage. Congratulations! You not only have a damage model you didn't have to pull out of your ass, your model is also fully integrated with what player sees in game - if the enemy knight has a visor, PC has a bow he can shoot with sufficient accuracy, the player can automatically shoot the guy right through the visor without you having to code this.

Complex, fine grained mechanics' allure lies in it allowing really unpredictible shit to happen. You're no longer confined to a narrow set of pre-scripted outcomes and actions, events designers couldn't have thought of are generated on the fly by the game itself.

As my proof of concept I present this simple little game, as well as this one.

It's not for no reason that 90% of the studies in military academies are focused on firearm accuracy, damage, weight and speed penalty.

 

[GarfunkeL]

It's not for no reason that 90% of the studies in military academies are focused on firearm accuracy, damage, weight and speed penalty.

I hope that's sarcasm

 

[DraQ]

It's not for no reason that 90% of the studies in military academies are focused on firearm accuracy, damage, weight and speed penalty.

I hope that's sarcasm

Strong enough for my assburger ass to detect.

 

[crufty]

yeah...I think one thing is important, simple small mechanics are better then complicated ones, when starting from scratch.

Look at jurassic park, it was a bit of a debacle. Ambitious? Yeah! Light years ahead of its time. Fun? I think so. But--most people didn't 'get it'.

btw, the context of all my posts is interactive fiction. Not a practical commercial platform, but I have found it a very viable prototype platform. An IF game is almost ALL mechanics and lends itself very well to the no numbers thought. For me, from an IF perspective, a "sword, +3" is an immersion issue. A "glowing sword with a silver pommel" fits the platform much better.

HP is a good abstraction. I like the idea of how it is a combination of damage, morale and skill all rolled int one. Dodging, parrying all that--bundled into hp. HOWEVER...when dodging, parrying, morale and actual damage is also included in the mechanics, then high value hp really loses meaning. For as much as I like the mid-level D&D mechanics, the high level stuff (the recent gold box memory posts made me groan about the upper-level dragon lance games, with 6 pcs standing off vs 20 dragons etc) totally falls apart. It's like the designers were afraid of pissing of the min/maxers with hp caps...which is the real answer to that problem. A person should only get SO much HP. Maybe slower hp dev and all that...

Draq what you describe is a good idea, but it could easily take a year to get a system to work part of the time for most cases, and I'm not sure what kind of framerate we'd get. Maybe something for the much vaunted PS3 cell ?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

HP is a good abstraction. I like the idea of how it is a combination of damage, morale and skill all rolled int one. Dodging, parrying all that--bundled into hp. HOWEVER...when dodging, parrying, morale and actual damage is also included in the mechanics, then high value hp really loses meaning. For as much as I like the mid-level D&D mechanics, the high level stuff (the recent gold box memory posts made me groan about the upper-level dragon lance games, with 6 pcs standing off vs 20 dragons etc) totally falls apart.

Actually, it falls apart around level 2-3 because the weapons and damage modifiers are designed to work against 1st level characters.

 

[DraQ]

yeah...I think one thing is important, simple small mechanics are better then complicated ones, when starting from scratch.

Not necessarily. Small and simple also means rigid and inflexible.
Small and simple also ensures that nothing of interest will happen in the game on its own, without being explicitly scripted - a crippling flaw in RPG that should adapt itself to the player's actions and generate emergent behaviour.

You want to have as complex mechanics as the platform allows and modern day PCs allow quite a lot.

Look at jurassic park, it was a bit of a debacle. Ambitious? Yeah! Light years ahead of its time. Fun? I think so. But--most people didn't 'get it'.

You mean Trespasser? It was. It also was buggy, unwieldy and severely cut down, in addition it refuses to run on my machine so I can't really speak about it much.

btw, the context of all my posts is interactive fiction. Not a practical commercial platform, but I have found it a very viable prototype platform.

Why should be impractical commercially? People seem to like sandboxes wide open games even if there is nothing to do in them. Besides, you can also insert plot and other handcrafted elements into the game too, as long as you respect its open nature.

HP is a good abstraction. I like the idea of how it is a combination of damage, morale and skill all rolled int one. Dodging, parrying all that--bundled into hp.

It isn't. It's shit mechanics.

First thing first, it tries to approximate multiple unordered elements as single linear scale.

When the strongest character's HP range is comparable with weakest weapon's damage range, meaning significant and inevitable risk of one hit kills, it can be tolerated as a poor-man's approximation of a proper damage system, as results it yields are not too different from something a system with given probability that next hit would kill or disable character and probability increasing with subsequent hits would produce. It's not a good abstraction, but as a coarse, inaccurate system to be used by a bunch of nerds with dice, c64 game or modern game involving battles with thousands of units per side it's good enough. Still, in a game about just one to eight characters running around killing things, that runs on modern machine it's grotesquely inadequate. Space-faring-race-with-black-powder-muskets inadequate.

Now, when HPs exceed weapon damage, the system goes FUBAR and yes, it's irreversible. Attempting to patch it by adding all the parries, critical strikes, and shitload of other feats is futile and retarded, as the system is broken at its core, and without replacing this core it will just fall apart again moments later. Kind of like trying to mod around limitations of Oblivious.
It becomes "lawl I can survive at lest 5 moar aruws lololol!1", and HP attrition begins.

HOWEVER...when dodging, parrying, morale and actual damage is also included in the mechanics, then high value hp really loses meaning.

Let me make this clear - HP doesn't represent dodging, parrying and such. Those don't degrade over time, or rather don't the degrade in the same way as HPs would describe them. HP fails to describe morale too, as it's unaffected by stuff that should greatly affect morale.

Dodging is generally represented (in D&D's case) by AC which is another failure, as the same AC can't properly describe effects of both dodging and armour. In any setting where getting killed by other beings with physical parameters similar to you is not the only hazard, AC as dodging is an automatic epic failure, as if, say, a falling boulder clonks the character in high AC armour, said character ends up crushed flat, despite being able to shrug off great majority of blows dealt by another humanoid, while a character with high AC dodge, will leap out of the way of the boulder with same ease as he would dodge a weapon of another character.

No, shit damage system is shit, and my system would probably be possible to implement even in an over 10 year old HL engine which supported separate hitboxes, possibly even hackable into UE1, where I've seen modded, location specific armour. It would also make HP attrition impossible by definition. Sure, some things in a damage system can be approximated as linear scales - fatigue, blood loss, possibly pain and morale, but for entire damage system such scale is grossly inadequate unless the system is designed to run fluently on a bunch of nerd with pens, paper and a handful of dice.

Draq what you describe is a good idea, but it could easily take a year to get a system to work part of the time for most cases

But after coding the stuff once, all the subsequent work on the game using it would be breeze. Plus I don't think it would take that long - collision detection isn't that hard and physics engines are available as middleware - might as well put them to some use instead of just making dead bodies flop around.

and I'm not sure what kind of framerate we'd get.

You can always simplify as necessary, but I doubt such system on its own would take more than P700 to run - collision detection is here for quite a long time now, same with locational damage. Basic physics engines that can calculate stuff like momentum and kinetic energy are old news as well, and even those that model interactions of multiple colliding bodies are not exactly new.

Again, check the links I posted showcasing two games benefiting from relatively complex mechanics that are key to making those games fun.

what I aim for is a system where stuff like weapon damage or armour class isn't just hidden, but simply meaningless, as weapons are described by sharpness of specific vertices and edges, several point masses and material, characters don't have any HPs and armour is an actual armour that prevents weapons from fucking character up by penetrating or inflicting blunt force trauma, not an abstract number and different model attached to the character after the player clicks an icon in his inventory.

 

[crufty]

well...

HP was originally, I believe, supposed to reflect dodge, parry etc. We're talking d&d basic maybe even ad&d 1e. In that sense hp is a great, simplifying mechanic for pnp rpging.


A halfway point between uber-simulation and abstraction might be more of a wound state. healthy, lightly wounded, heavily wounded, mortally wounded.

 

[DraQ]

well...

HP was originally, I believe, supposed to reflect dodge, parry etc. We're talking d&d basic maybe even ad&d 1e. In that sense hp is a great, simplifying mechanic for pnp rpging.

No and no.

Dodge/parry doesn't work in this way, where first blow may have no chance of killing you and the last blow no chance of being parried.

Besides AC has always been there and it happens to try (and fail) to represent both armour, shield and dodge.

Besides, HPs in a cRPG will be used to represent some sort of wound resistance, if only because of the need to represent hit results on the screen, so the discussion whether they are good or bad mechanics is purely academic given that they are clearly an inadequate one for the medium.

A halfway point between uber-simulation and abstraction might be more of a wound state. healthy, lightly wounded, heavily wounded, mortally wounded.

Wound state is still a linear scale and thus a HP system with another name.

 

[crufty]

Dodge/parry doesn't work in this way, where first blow may have no chance of killing you and the last blow no chance of being parried.

you sure? I'm pretty sure there was no dodge/parry mechanic. It was all part of "hp".

Besides, HPs in a cRPG will be used to represent some sort of wound resistance

agreed agreed.

f only because of the need to represent hit results on the screen, so the discussion whether they are good or bad mechanics is purely academic given that they are clearly an inadequate one for the medium.

well...one could have hp, and then assign a creature body points. hp / bp = physical hit ratio. So a 100 hp creature w/4 bp 'dodges' all hp loss of 1-24, then on 25 a wound sprite could get applied.

Wound state is still a linear scale and thus a HP system with another name.

Is it linear? Does it have to be?
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic ... 87#1133987

 

[DraQ]

Dodge/parry doesn't work in this way, where first blow may have no chance of killing you and the last blow no chance of being parried.

you sure? I'm pretty sure there was no dodge/parry mechanic. It was all part of "hp".

I'd say it's all part of AC. HP aren't modified by Dex, something that affects both to-hit rolls and AC.

f only because of the need to represent hit results on the screen, so the discussion whether they are good or bad mechanics is purely academic given that they are clearly an inadequate one for the medium.

well...one could have hp, and then assign a creature body points. hp / bp = physical hit ratio. So a 100 hp creature w/4 bp 'dodges' all hp loss of 1-24, then on 25 a wound sprite could get applied.

I don't know if I understood correctly, but dodge shouldn't degrade this way.

I don't really understand those attempts at patching someone that is so fundamentally broken. Tearing it down for being shit then proceeding to make something better surely beats investing much effort only to postpone tearing it down and making something better, as well as refusing to tear it down and wallowing in shit.

HP scale only makes some sense when it's calibrated in a way that any character can be killed with a single blow of any, suitable weapon. Like any human (including legendary warrior or a powerful mage) with shittiest rusty dagger.

It breaks down when unsuitable weapons are present and is imprecise even when it works.

If you use the system I outlined, with external and internal hitboxes for characters and specific organs, body areas, with assigned cumulative probabilities of failure and varied effects (that can be approximated with small HP scales), then if you introduce players to some huge ass monster, it won't require any additional effort or mechanics to make it nigh unkillable with dagger, because while it may wound, hurt, and induce some bleeding, it won't outright kill the monster in neither one, or one hundred blows because it won't penetrate deeply enough to reach vital area hitboxes, and thus succeed only at pissing it off, maybe distracting it.

Wound state is still a linear scale and thus a HP system with another name.

Is it linear? Does it have to be?

If you have several possible states that are strictly ordered, then yes, it is.

healthy, lightly wounded, heavily wounded, mortally wounded

Is just a different way of saying "5, 4, 3, 2, 1".

You may apply modifiers to character's actions based on such scale, but so you can do based on HP percentage.

 

[crufty]

I like, I like.

re ac, that is another abstraction. Yes dodge is there too. It's very soft and fuzzy--not defending it from a crpg perspective. But for a bunch of 8 yrs sitting around a table 8 million years ago, it was in retrospective a nice mechanic.

I haven't had a chance to work on a descriptive damage system. But I get your point--an adult person has identical, intrinsic amount of damage they can sustain, regardless if they are stephen hawking or andre the giant. So damage systems might be better off focusing more on how damage gets applied and less how much damage can be sustained.


*wonders off to meditate under a waterfall*

 

[DraQ]

re ac, that is another abstraction.

An excessively bad one. It fails mostly by integrating dodge, as an arbitrarily powerful attack can be dodged, but not absorbed.

Good abstraction is one that describes some system with less complexity while still providing reasonably accurate prediction, bad abstraction is what happens when reduced detail makes predictions go all shit and inaccurate.

But I get your point--an adult person has identical, intrinsic amount of damage they can sustain, regardless if they are stephen hawking or andre the giant.

Not exactly, as willpower might modify resistance to pain, endurance might modify one's ability to cope with wounds, blood loss and function after getting wounded and may make the difference between profusely bleeding character collapsing on the spot and one that can hold together despite bleeding all over the place, till sufficiently advanced medicine or magic is applied (for "still alive but requiring long recovery", not "good as new, here and now" result) and extra thickness of muscles might hinder penetration. The bottom line, however is this - if you're skewered through the heart, or your head gets crushed to a mush, you die - even if you're fucking Conan, and even if you're fucking Conan, one stab with a rusty dagger done right might do the job.

Tweaking probabilities, modifiers, internal hitboxes and restorative provisions might be used to make the game as hard or as soft as it is desired without hurting its semi-realistic style.

So damage systems might be better off focusing more on how damage gets applied and less how much damage can be sustained.

Yes, and where.

 

[crufty]

Yes, and where.

so a weapon source would have properties of
- source mass (light ... heavy)
- source speed (slow ... fast)
- source contact type(s) (dull...sharp)
- source projectile spin axis (z (rifled), y (spinning/tomahawk), x (slicing/boomerang), random(objects falling off cliff--perhaps damage more random, ow that got in my eye vs lucky it hit me in the helmet))
- source contact motion (z-axis/stabbing/punching, x/y/z (slicing/roundhouse), y/z (chopping),x-y(parry/blocking),projectile)
- source shape (gaseous...round…angular)
- source thickness (flat...thick for non gas, A' x B' for average impact vs human for gas)
- source hardness (soft…hard, C' visibility for A' x B' impact for human in full sunlight for gas)
- source target-protection modifiers (always fails (no more kitty of death!), average, always passes (foozle points his death wand))
- source vitality modifier (non-lethal (rubber bullets?) ...foreign object (eg average)…foreign object multiplier(amount)---ie hollow point vs ak…instantly lethal (deaths wand))
- source vitality effect applications [ target state change(effect (sleepy, slow), amount (little, lots, instant), injection (injection effect (poison slow death, poison instant pain), effect amount (little, lots, instant)), environmental change (type (heat,cold), amount (little…lot)), etc)
- source environmental effect applications
- source target radius (one location,multiple locations(zones(reach based (kung-fu vs dragon), spread based (shotgun)), amount), impacted creature (foozle death ray, poison gas), A' x B' (fire ball) etc)

to see if one hits, some kind of source contact test vs target

if the test results in contact
- target location (leg...body..arm..head)

a penetration test vs
- location protection hardness (effectiveness vs sharp & speed)
- location protection impact force dispersion aka resistance to pierce (effectiveness vs mass & speed)
- location protection thickness
location protections probably have other attributes.

test result determines degree of penetration (light…heavy…complete pass thru)

degree of penetration determines test difficulty vs target vitality (encompassing target toughness/endurance/strength attributes vs current location vitality state vs global creature/object (for doors) vitality state, eg shooting hinges off door changes door state)

degree of vitality test failure results in wound state shift vs location

location wound results in target test modifier (a shift downwards, harder to resist multiple attacks) at location
target tests vs global test modifier...possible test modifiers (down) across all target tests, and possible additional tests, including test vs death (creature) or vs complete destruction (object).

I like. Notice no numbers here!

The more i think about it the more i like it. Good idea draq! Damn good idea.

Not that I'll go anywhere with it, but maybe this thought experiment will trigger other folks ideas.

 

[J1M]

What is this I don't even...

I go away for a couple weeks and Draq shits all over this thread with ideas for his single player action game. Maybe if I go away for another two weeks he'll figure out what the word abstraction means.

 

[DraQ]

What is this I don't even...

I go away for a couple weeks and Draq shits all over this thread with ideas for his single player action game. Maybe if I go away for another two weeks he'll figure out what the word abstraction means.

Well, given that I spent a post or two explaining difference between good and bad abstraction, why HP are definitely a case of bad abstraction, and why abstraction in general is not particularly advantageous (ACHTUNG! euphemism!) in a fucking computer game where there is no living GM, yeah, I definitely not get it.

But, by all means, do go away for another two weeks - maybe you will finally grasp this reading comprehension I've heard so much about.

 

[crufty]

obviously the model is imperfect...

if there isn't an resistor for a given descriptor, the descriptor doesn't do much.

d6 is just one method of abstraction.

 

[J1M]

What is this I don't even...

I go away for a couple weeks and Draq shits all over this thread with ideas for his single player action game. Maybe if I go away for another two weeks he'll figure out what the word abstraction means.

Well, given that I spent a post or two explaining difference between good and bad abstraction, why HP are definitely a case of bad abstraction, and why abstraction in general is not particularly advantageous (ACHTUNG! euphemism!) in a fucking computer game where there is no living GM, yeah, I definitely not get it.

But, by all means, do go away for another two weeks - maybe you will finally grasp this reading comprehension I've heard so much about.

The only part of your posts I have trouble comprehending is why you've spent so much text to explain such a simplistic and flawed idea.

 

[DraQ]

The only part of your posts I have trouble comprehending is why you've spent so much text to explain such a simplistic and flawed idea.

I'll avoid posting any actual arguments so as to avoid exposing myself as complete moron.

No prob.