Whoa! Where are all these posts coming from? I hope I can get through everything!
John quoted me:
I'm inclined to think that in this case the 9mm has been overrated because of early misinformation and should be closer to a .22, but so many player characters have chosen to carry 9mms that it would be unfair to them to change it, and unfair to you to penalize your 9mm relative to theirs.Penalize my 9mm relative to theirs? That seems to imply that, because I'm arguing the 357 should be more powerful, you would penalize the 9mm to make that happen. The genie giving you the biggest house in the neighborhood, by burning down everyone else house, sort of.
O.K., let me attempt to say it again.
At some point, someone introduced a 9mm handgun into the game. That was probably two decades ago, before I was involved. Someone decided that a 9mm handgun did a lot more damage than a .22. That is, if we divided handguns into damaging ones with slow light bullets, lethal ones with fast heavy bullets, and a middle category of those whose bullets are either fast or heavy but not both, the 9mm landed in that middle category. Adam has one. Shawn has one. I'll bet John Walker has one. I'm pretty sure Michael di Vars has one. They're all rated "dangerous" because the first ones were.
Now you come along and you say that a .357 is probably a dangerous gun--not as powerful as a .50 Desert Eagle, or a heavy rifle, which are the standard for "fast heavy bullets", and so not a "lethal" weapon. But you say it's more potent than a 9mm, which has considerably lighter bullets. But what your argument says to me is that I've been overrating the 9mm since it first got mentioned somewhere in one of the original books, and it should have been treated as slow light bullets, damaging like the .22s (and I'll note that a .22 pistol and a .22 long rifle are in the same damage category despite the differences in bullet mass). It really bothers you that your .357 does not do more damage than your 9mm--or, put the other way, that your 9mm does as much damage as your .357.
So if I've read this right, the 9mm should be and should always have been a damaging weapon.
It isn't and it never has been, as far as I recall. I've been giving it dangerous category status for a while, I think. It keeps the same status because I try to look up weapons that are similar to others already in play and match them. So I should not have given it the dangerous category, and it should have the damaging category.
So I can go back and tell a dozen players that the gun on which they have long relied isn't as good as they have always thought, and from now on will do only half as much damage, and they should have chosen the Colt .45 or the .357 Magnum or something like that. But that would be unfair to them, because they have come to have a certain expectation of the amount of damage their guns do.
Or I can say, too bad, in Multiverser 9mm pistols do a surprising amount of damage because I don't feel like changing it for everyone and don't think it would be fair to do so, and so John is just going to have to suffer with the fact that his 9mm is much better than he thinks it should be.
Or I can say, since this bothers John so much and no one else cares, John's 9mm pistol will henceforth be a damaging weapon, but this change won't affect John Walker or Adam Keller or Michael di Vars or Shawn Kelley or any other player who has a 9mm with a dangerous rating, because they don't mind it being overpowered; and if John Cross ever winds up in a shootout with one of them (it could happen), well, the fact that their 9mm pistols are better than his is just his bad luck, they must have gotten them in worlds that make better 9mms.
Now, I'm going with the second option, unless you insist I go with the third.
Why didn't you try to make the scenario winnable despite my decision to split up? I want you to know, I'm not arguing. I'm just curious about your reasoning. The Realism vs Good Story argument seems like a referee's thing.
O.K., I'm not really comfortable with the "realism versus good story telling" distinction, from a game theory perspective. A lot of players and referees use the concept, but:
- It's an unreal distinction. It suggests that to tell a good story you have to dispose of realism--that the only good stories are fantasies in which heroes are never injured and villains never succeed. It's a The Last Action Hero kind of world, where the hero's fatal injuries become scratches and bruises. You can tell a good story in a world in which the hero can die, or can lose an eye (Joe Kondor) or an arm (Michael di Vars), or can destroy a spaceship or kill his entire crew by accident (Chris Jones). Risk makes a story better. "Good story telling" is in some groups code for "referee fiat to give plot immunity to player characters", and that means there never really is any risk, and it doesn't matter what you do. I know that's not how Eric runs his Multiverser games--and that brings up
- The categories unfairly pigeonhole referees. Calling me "realistic" suggests that I can't do fantasies and superheroes and other worlds in which what we call realism is in some ways suspended, and I think I've demonstrated that I can suspend a lot of aspects of realism. Calling Eric "storytelling" suggests that he's going to suspend all the rules of cause and effect to enable the players to beat the odds even when they make terrible decisions, and he's noted elsewhere that he does not do that. It isn't even a "scale" between one end and the other. It isn't even as if "realism" means "simulationism" and "storytelling" means "narrativism"--"storytelling" often means "railroading" or "illusionism", and "realism" often means "gamism".
What the question here is is why I didn't change the scenario to accommodate your bad decision. The answer is, I don't do that. Once I've put something in place in a scenario, it's in place. I know that until you know it I can change it, and I've given that advice to referees before; but I would only do that to maintain the intended level of challenge of the scenario, and always when it involves something I have not decided. (For example, if the enemy's fortress is supposed to be impenetrable by the world's available technology and you decide you're going to go in through the sewers, that signals me that I forgot to decide on protections against incursion through the sewers, but that the enemy would not have overlooked that so I have to add those protections now--or else use a game mechanic to determine whether somehow he overlooked what I overlooked, such as an intellect check for him or a GE roll for you.)
You had a chance. The monsters you were to face were deadly, but you would get GE rolls for how many and how often. When you split up, you also had to rely on GE rolls for what happens to the team over which you no longer have direct control. They were tough, but they weren't invincible. The odds were at that point strongly against you, but they were the odds you chose.
You're asking me why I did not vacate your choice. I'll admit that there are scenarios in which I do that--if you're in the Terrorist Tower scenario of Why Spy, you will go through the encounters in the listed order no matter which way you go through the building, because it is structured like scenes from an action movie, not like a dungeon crawl, and no choice you make will change what you face next. On the other hand, you have lots of power over the part of that scenario that matters: what you do in response to those encounters. In the scenario on the spaceship, it was more like a dungeon crawl with a huge wandering monster factor ("good enough" probably meant only one small one, and "better than anticipated" meant it was asleep when you saw it). Your choices boosted the number of encounters while keeping the potency of them the same.
You said you didn't expect the split up. I bet that would be a choice a great deal of players would make.
John, you weren't supposed to be in that scenario anyway--you brought it on yourself, and you created that group.
When I dropped you in TerraNova Habitat, I was going to run you much as I ran Scott Glenning before you. It's a habitat in space. You have to establish an identity on it, get involved in the world, and see what you can gain from it. It's a player-driven scenario: if you turn it into a training and building world, you have lots of opportunity to do that; if you want action, you find a way to get it, probably by equipping yourself and leaving for somewhere else, maybe finding an employer that does planet survey missions or something. There was another player in that world some years back who enrolled in school and was advancing nicely before he vanished from the game.
You prayed for someone fitting Lauren's description to come to your world and teach you psionic skills. I think you probably hoped you would get The Architect, and I'll tell you up front that I really hate it when players attempt to bring supercharacters into their scenarios, because it ultimately means that I have to restructure the scenario to become a challenge for the supercharacter. The Architect is not one of your character resources, and if you treat him like he is you're going to find out that his patience is not infinite. But it happens that the scenario in which I put you was originally written as a gather world in which Lauren Hastings, Joe Kondor, and Derek Brown were the perfect people to face the disaster I designed for them to face (in a novel). Lauren fit the description of what you wanted perfectly--she's even a better teacher than the Architect, and quite skilled in psionics. She also fit that world--but only if the disaster which was the reason she was there was going to happen. In the book, it happened within a week; you managed to forestall it to twenty-five days. But when you asked for her, you asked for the reason for her to be there, and that reason was the disaster that never would have happened had you not requested it.
And maybe that's something you should keep in mind. Senior verses might come when you pray for them, but God never does anything for only one reason, so if a senior verser comes to your universe it's because something is going to happen that requires that senior verser to be there. On the Tropical Island, Michael di Vars has to be there to show the new versers the courage of facing death. In Columbus, the Architect had to be there because he is the only person in the Multiverse who can preach a religion of love and peace to the Dar Koni warriors without being very quickly on the receiving end of their treatment of foreigners. On TerraNova, Lauren was there because she had to try to save the space colony from the incoming ship.
So when you invite a senior verser to your world, you also invite whatever trouble comes with him.
You also needed Derek. Derek is the only person in ten galaxies who stood any chance of getting past the security lockouts on the helm and disabling or destroying that ship in the time provided. Besides, Lauren needed Derek to introduce her to Raeph Williams, who was part of her story.
The person you did not need was Joe Kondor, and that's because you had to be the leader of this group. But you were at a serious disadvantage, because Joe was the member of the team who understood spaceship systems and knew about gravity generators, and the gravity being out on the ship was supposed to be a problem. You offered a solution: you prayed for another verser, one who could teach you to box, and it happens that Claude Winston Beverige III has decent skills in boxing and experience on a spaceship, so it was simple to give him the necessary engineering skill to recognize and correct the gravity problem for you.
But the only reason you had any problem was because you'd prayed for a team; and the only reason you had four on your team is that you prayed for the fourth. If you'd been limited to three, I think there's no way in any universe you'd have split the group. It's not my fault you had four, and it's not my fault that when you were on a twenty-ninth century space habitat you had absolutely no interest in learning about things like gravity generators and life support systems so you had no ability to deal with those problems without help. It was my fault that Joe Kondor was not also there, but then, technically you didn't need him, because you had you and you had Claude, and the two of you together were probably almost equal to him.
As far as other players, when I put people on TerraNova Habitat they don't usually ask for superversers to join them there, so I don't need to create a disaster suitable to the abilities of a superverser. You created a special challenge level by bringing in the big guns, and then you didn't use them effectively because you underrated the challenge level.
MJ, regarding additional damage categories. You said something that one category was 10 points, and the next was 30, the obvious middle ground would be 15, which is too hard to crunch. So go with a not-so-obvious middle ground. Perhaps 20. Still easy to crunch, still gives a new damage category.
Yeah, well, that's not what I said, and I agree that 20 is easy to crunch--which is why it, and not 30, which would be extremely difficult to crunch, is the damage category.
And you know when people say that there's no harm in asking? Well, sometimes there is. If you know I'm not going to like the request, you shouldn't ask it. It just takes up my time.
--M. J. Young
Thank you for the research, Glantri. The numbers add credence to my best logical guess.
the .357, however, DOES penetrate body armor much more effectively. It is a weapon built to pierce right through, an AP round rather than a normal round or an HP round. It should negate some of the foe's protection, in addition to a chance of knockdown.
or, put the other way, that your 9mm does as much damage as your .357.
Ya know what? Putting it like that, it makes a lot more sense. I think I got confused because I had the 9mm first. If I had had the 357 first, "Base Damaging" and then got the 9mm "Base Damaging" I would have been jumping for joy. I saw one similar. An ant's brain has the processing power of a MAC computer. Or put another way, a MAC computer is equal to the brain of an ant. A lot of the arguments that ran though were because people were saying the two weapons did the same damage in real life (Or so was my understanding) Any gun enthusiast can tell you that's poppycock.
O.K., let me attempt to say it again.
When did you say that the first time? You might have said it to someone else, but not to me. If you did, you didn't explain it as well. Saying the 9mm was as powerful as the 357 made SOOOOOOOOOO much more sense.
ME
You said you didn't expect the split up. I bet that would be a choice a great deal of players would make.
MJ
John, you weren't supposed to be in that scenario anyway--you brought it on yourself, and you created that group.
OK, I'm seriously confused. You said you were play testing the TerraNova scenario. Was the "Lauren's Disaster" bit a part of TerraNova, or was it a part of Lauren Hastings? I thought you would want feedback about the scenario. Was that not part of the TerraNova scenario? I was thinking that referees could use that bit regardless of if Lauren showed up. I thought you might want the input on it.
Yeah, well, that's not what I said, and I agree that 20 is easy to crunch--which is why it, and not 30, which would be extremely difficult to crunch, is the damage category.
Yeah, I feel stupid.
And you know when people say that there's no harm in asking? Well, sometimes there is. If you know I'm not going to like the request, you shouldn't ask it. It just takes up my time.
Actually, I found a way around that. I am going to run through it again in my current game. I think you'll like how I pull it off. It will be a legitimate skill I'm teaching myself too.
(Doing Therapy)
No, the spaceship crash is not a standard part of the TerraNova Habitat scenario. It's an optional disaster that I wouldn't use unless something else introduced it.
--M. J. Young
Oh I didn't realize that. So all of that feedback was pretty useless.
Now that we have the damage categories straightened out, you said some time ago that you were going to reduce the damage category of my MAK 90 to damaging. Was that one of those things you were only doing to me? It used to be base lethal. That would make a 50 caliber machine gun no more powerful than an AK-47. Or, put another way, make the AK-47 as powerful as a 50 caliber machine gun. That latter sounds really nice. If we can get it raised back to base lethal now that I better understand the system, that would be great.
MJ, you gotta admit. I only argue until I completely understand something. Then when I understand it, I admit failure. That's gotta count for something.
(Doing Therapy)
Two, many, many hours later.
MJ, I told you that the TerraNova scenario was a bit boring until Lauren showed up. It was, even though it's a candy store world for high-tech equipment. However, the fact that it was boring gave me a great deal of insight into why versers get involved. An eternity of "Get up, go to work, go home, go to bed." doesn't sound all that appealing. Get involved so you don't die of boredom. I thought you would be interested.
It's sometimes nice to have downtime, most of the skill increases, and other things happen during downtime between action scenes. As a player the spaceship suicide mission would have interested me.
Adam
John, you have to MAKE it interesting. the 9-5 job probably is uninteresting, but what about learning a skill, at a college or something like it, that IS interesting to roleplay?
Besides, i think you underestimate player impact on the story. It's not all the ref.
For TerraNova Habitat, I'd reccomend tossing in a bunch of stuff that's not neccessarily dangerous (it could be if you're incautious perhaps), but is weird. Give the player something to think about.
Its a very high tech scenario, not as high as Starsong, but probably MJ's most hi-tech world.
Sports
Games
Politics
Eating
Law
Culture
So let's come up with a few neat ideas for each category.
Sports: Obviously Zero-G Sports (Wrestling, and Tossball--four people on a team in a sphere with one orbitting ball that changes color every twenty seconds from red to green. The objective is for the ball to hit the ball target when its the color of your team.)
Games: TerraNova, especially when it was being built, had very long corridors, up to ten miles long that were later cut up. This led to a variety of marble and billiard ball games with extremely long shots. The longest billiard shot (with a powered pool stick-a modified gravity puncher used for work on the exterior of TN Habitat.) is a mile and a half shot of a white ball to sink a red ball. This TerraNova Habitat record shot has stood for twenty years.
Politics: On the lower levels of politics about half of the jobs are done by lottery appointments. This offers much fun. Forex...
"Verser, your name came up in the lottery. For the next six months you and two other people will replace three retired board members on the 12 person Sewer Board for Cube 1722 in TerraNova."
Then the verser gets to climb inside sewer tunnels, talk to workers about their manager, read audit material to look for discrepancies, and possibly find a bit of corruption by a contractor putting in substandard equipment.
Eating: Choose two culinary traditions on Earth that are not normally joined. SouthMex...Fried Chicken, Refried Blackeye Beans, Pulled Pork BBQ Burritoes, Buttermilk Biscuits with Chipotle Chorizo Gravy...
Law: You are permitted to have a computer with a telepathic scanner with a secure network (this network is legally required to be a separate net from the rest of the Habitat for privacy reasons.) judge your case. This takes about a day, and it is limited to non-capital cases...
Actually, that brings up another well-trod idea in far future SF. If you do engage in certain really horrible crimes (rape, murder, serious torture, kidnapping) they try you, and then they mindwipe you and after a proper pschy test, they install a useful law-abiding personality.
Culture: 1. Like a lot of space-based societies, TerraNova Habitat has a culture of certain minimum standards. Safety is a high requirement in space, and so to a lesser degree is neatness.
Staements like 'Look thrice, jump once' are commonplace proverbs and 'a dirty house is a dangerous house.' is another.
They are rich enough to deal with people who can't meet these standards in a generous manner. But while they are generous, it is also non-optional. There are no 'homeless' as such people are put in group homes or other arrangements. Some people are confined by technological devices that limit their freedom and compel certain actions, some are housed in a variety of ways, and some few with extraoridinarily severe problems are mindwiped.
TerraNova is also a static culture. Once the Habitats were built, the last surge of change and vision subsided into a desire for a static society.
There is little technological advance. All relevant 'stakeholders' affected by a technological advance have to have their representatives agree to a tech advance. Plus, the whole patents, techlabs, veneration of garage room inventors and all the whole setup that turns America into a tech inventing and applying MACHINE is simply not here.
It brought people to the stars, but then it faltered because it was just so tiring keeping up, and because it was dangerous dealing with that level of social change. As tech sped up, so did wars.
So things paused. And then they swung back in pendulum fashion for the Great Progress which led to the Habitats. And then came the Interregnum, the Pause, the Golden Age, the Long Now, the Present...
Art is classical, not in our sense, but in the sense that there are accepted forms and tactics that have been laid down for centuries.
Besides, i think you underestimate player impact on the story. It's not all the ref.
I don't know, it just didn't inspire my imagination much beyond "Skills, equipment, skills, equipment." This new world has my imagination running a million miles an hour. If I had stayed in TerraNova, I'd have some mad martial arts skills by now, I'll tell you that much. It is a candy store world, I'll give you that. I just didn't use it to its full potential, I suppose.
(Doing Therapy)
Too much here for me to answer it all, but let me say that I love worlds like TerraNova--places where I can hunt down local teachers to train me in new skills, build up what I can do, all in a relatively safe environment, and experiment with teaching myself new skills.
What will kill me is botching on some crazy idea I wanted to try.
--M. J. Young
Don't get me wrong MJ, it was a good world for me. I just didn't use it as hard as I could have. That bit about hunting down local teachers. I hadn't really thought of that. A teacher to improve my guns skills would have been nice.
(Doing Therapy)
Not to mention that given a few years you could have been professional at repairing various spaceship systems, or operating computers. The station has biocomputers in critical circuits, about as advanced as you can get because the data storage is at the molecular level. It has advanced artificial gravity systems that don't "pulse" the way the Mary Piper Beta's do because they're miniaturized and phased. You could have walked out of that station with tech skills beyond anything you've seen--it was later said of Derek that if you gave him five minutes with a computer he could get it to tell you its designer's mother's maiden name.
Didn't interest you, ultimately. You are happy with low-tech skills that work anywhere. You might change your mind one day, but you might not.
--M. J. Young
You are happy with low-tech skills that work anywhere.
Yeah, how many worlds am I going to run into where fixing a spaceship is a practical skill? Knitting or weaving on the other hand.... Those are practical skills. I was a touch disappointed that I had to leave Dancing Princess the way I did. I was kind of looking forward to getting some more low-tech skills.
Two, hours later.
Someone, I think it was Eric, asked if you were going to be hearing about this a year from now. I see why you would ask, but I was just trying to get ideas about different refereeing styles. I think, as a referee, I would be sorely tempted to kind of ensure the player made it to the end of the scenario. MJ had a problem with "Realism vs Telling a good story." Maybe that was a good story, but a good story can always be made better. I was just wondering why MJ didn't ensure my survival. Learning about different refereeing styles by asking questions. I see the validity in his points. Wasn't ever trying to argue anything related to that, just trying to learn.
(Doing Therapy)
I often become annoyed by GM's ensuring I make it to the end of a story line. If I was guaranteed to make it to the end of the story line regardless of my tactical decisions why let me make decisions?
And that's why I asked about it. I see why some would think it a bad idea. I still think I'd be tempted to do it.
(Doing Therapy)
I think I could have survived it splitting up :)
Adam
Yeah, I think Adam could have survived it splitting up, and the more so if Geneice was with him.
John, ensuring that the player character makes it to the end of the story is called Illusionism or Participationism, and you can read about them in Theory 101: The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, along with Trailblazing and Bass Playing, which are the styles preferred in Multiverser play.
--M. J. Young
shredders dangerous blast with a damaging fragments rider within 10 yards, damaging blast with annoying fragments in the next ten, and annoying blast in the next ten.
This seems like a good place to ask about damage categories. How does this blast radius work? It's a dangerous blast with damaging fragments. So how much area does the damaging blast cover? Also, a direct hit with one of these would, quite literally, cut someone in half. Is that within the capabilities of a damaging blast? I'm just trying to understand how this works. What if I shot a door with one? It's supposed to get blown off the hinges. I think that's what they were designed for, actually. Taking down heavy doors. Would that be within those parameters? How does that work?
(Doing Therapy)
This is a grenade, right?
Grenades are tricky, because you've got the whole point of impact versus area of effect balance happening. But take it that a successful roll means that the grenade detonated more or less where you wanted it to. I would take it that this is a secondary rider. That means something like this:
- You throw the grenade at your target and roll the skill success check.
- If you're throwing it at a large target, such as a vehicle or a crowd or a building, we roll a GE roll for whether it lands in a place where it will damage a lot or a little. In the case of the vehicle and the building this is a question of whether it does cosmetic, general, or structure damage. In the case of the crowd, it's a matter of how many people are within the blast radius.
- In determining your chance of success, the defensive values of multiple targets are not part of that. The defensive value of a single target would be.
- The primary damage is listed as kinetic blast, which is a form of blunt force trauma across the whole body. The GE roll determines how many people are within ten yards of the impact point; the roll determines the blast damage it does. Whatever defenses they have against blunt force blast damage are taken into account on an individual basis to reduce or avoid damage. If any are player characters, they also get an individual agility check for moving out to the next ring of the damage area, which means they leapt out of the way far enough to reduce injury from the blast impact. Those who are in the central blast area who do not avoid damage take dangerous level damage from the blunt impact of the blast.
- Those who are within that central area are also hit with fragments from the device. These fragments are probably piercing kinetic trauma, like arrows or bullets, and certain defenses which will reduce blunt force impact trauma will not affect them, and others which will not stop blunt force impact will stop them, so the defenses are checked against this secondary damage type. Those who do not avoid it take damaging damage, amount based on the same roll as the blunt damage, but less damage because it is a lower damage category.
- Once those within the central area are covered, the same rules apply to those in the next ten yards out from that center point. Now, though, the force of the blast is reduced to damaging, and the force of the fragments to annoying.
- The process is repeated once more for those in the third ring, between twenty and thirty yards from the impact point, but these take only annoying damage from the blast.
- If damage category bonuses apply to the grenade use, it raises the primary and secondary damage categories by one per category in each zone, and add additional damage categories beyond them so that the final damage category will be annoying.
--M. J. Young
This is a grenade, right?
No, it's more like a bullet that explodes on impact.
(Doing Therapy)
Oh.
I'd say that the stats given are wrong; they indicate damage done by an explosive device such as a grenade. I'll have to consider how the shell works when I have to deal with it in play.
--M. J. Young