I was thinking about something. My character is training in boxing. The thing is that there are many different types of boxing. There's the boxing we do today, there's bare-knuckle boxing, there's at least one more style that I can't remember the name of. Is this covered in Multiverser? Or to be an expert boxer, would you need to learn all of the styles? Could you be a 2@5 in bare-knuckle, but a 2@10 in another style?
Of all of the boxing styles, bare-knuckle boxing is the most effective. Mike Tyson would not have stood a chance against a bare-knuckle boxer. Fights went 75-100 rounds. A round ended when someone was knocked down. That means someone got knocked down 30-50 times in a single fight.
I was just thinking that a thread for random things might be cool. We all ask some pretty random questions, and rather than clutter up the board, make a thread for it. Any thoughts?
The whole point of wearing boxing gloves is so that you don't seriously injure the other guy! If Mike Tyson was attacked by someone without gloves you can be sure he wouldn't put gloves on to fight him (well, after he bit his ear off, anyway).
I think its actually the other way around. You can hit someone harder with boxing gloves. It protects the hand.
Course, I think if Tyson went up against a bare-knuckle brawler, old school, he'd find himself sucking wind pretty quick, and the other guy would be just getting warm. Knock out in the tenth round to the brawler.
I've complained before about the moment in Time Cop where Van Damme goes up against someone who sparred with Dempsey. High, spinning kicks are pretty, but a good right jab would probably be more effective.
Yes they do protect the hands, but because of their added weight, heavier gloves are generally considered safer, since impulse in physics is a measure of force over time and a padded glove increases the time over which momentum is transferred. This reduces the average force experienced by both the boxer's hand and the target. A blow to the head with a heavily padded glove is less likely to cause the sudden acceleration of the skull that causes much of the brain trauma associated with boxing injuries. Larger gloves also dissipate the force of the blow over a larger area, resulting in less injury to tissue at the site of the blow.
On the specific question of whether those are distinct or unified skills, that would be up to the referee, actually. There is a degree to which skill discrimination and generalization are almost always left to the referee.
The example I usually use is driving. The rules distinguish driving a standard transmission from driving an automatic, but beyond that it's just driving. How many categories of driving do we need? That depends on what kind of worlds we're going to have. A referee can, if he prefers, make all driving "driving", and insist that an expert has had experience and knowledge in everything needed to drive any vehicle in any situation; he can then sit-mod for anything that would be particularly challenging, such as driving a moon rover, or pulling a skid turn in a demolition derby.
He can instead divide driving skills into categories based on vehicle types and functions--driving heavy trucks, driving construction equipment, driving race cars, chauffering, stunt driving--usually discriminating these at the professional level so that a professional truck drive is a top level amateur in any other kind of driving. If he likes, he can narrow it again at expert level, so a professional construction equipment driver might be an expert front end loader operator.
He can instead divide driving skills into individual techniques, requiring specific listed skills in skid turn, sideswipe, ram, roll, jump, and scores of other specific driving tricks, and then adjust by sit-mod for the vehicle and conditions, so that a skid turn is easier to do in a GTO than in an eighteen wheeler.
What matters is, what do I as referee what to do with these skills? How do I want to handle them?
It is possible to run Multiverser with maybe a dozen martial arts styles, or even fewer, simply by classing every style as one of those. Is it fast or slow, weapon-utilizing, weapon-dependent, or weapon-adverse, and everything else just gets lumped together (you don't have to care whether it's a punch or a kick or a grapple, since the basic attacks and defenses aren't important to resolution and the maneuvers can be connected to any style). I could decide that all boxing is boxing, and the variant "styles" are simply techniques for the boxer to master; I could decide that each boxing variant is its own style, and mastery of one means nothing to the others. That's up to the referee in each game.
--M. J. Young
I don't like how so many things are "up to the referee" It just doesn't sit well with me for some reason. Does the player not have any say whatsoever in things like this? Personally, I would class all boxing as boxing, because a punch is a punch. A right hook is a right hook, whether it's Karate, Tae quon do, boxing, or a drunken brawl in the parking lot. MJ might not think so. Why do I not have any say in that? Just wondering.
Well, first, the fact is that it's up to the referee to run the mechanics of the thing. Using the car example again, I could ask you whether you've ever done a one eighty skid turn in a tractor trailer; you could answer no, but you have driven a tractor trailer; you could answer no, but you have done a one eighty skid turn in a flatbed. Maybe you've done both. At that point I'm going to tell you to roll the dice. I don't have to tell you whether you are 1) applying your skill at driving tractor trailers to trying to do a skid turn at a heavy penalty; 2) applying your skill at skid turns to doing one on a tractor trailer at a heavy penalty; 3) teaching yourself the skill of doing skid turns on a tractor trailer, which is probably a heavily penalized skill itself. What matters to you is that I treat you fairly; what matters to me is that I treat you fairly, and that I facilitate future play.
Now, if I think that the future of the game (something I will know better than you, although neither of us will know with certainty) is going to have you doing a lot of stunt driving in tractor-trailers, it's going to be much easier for me in the long term to give you a skill in tractor-trailer skid turns, so that as you get good at that we can use it in play specifically. In that case, I oblige myself to be rather lenient on my definition of "new use", allowing a bonus any time you use the skill on, perhaps, a new surface, or with a different kind of trailer or significantly different load. I might instead think that the odds of you having much use for such a skill that narrowly defined is minimal, and I'm better off letting you use your skid turn skill and giving you new use for the tractor-trailer--in which case I have to be stricter in my assessment of what constitutes a "new use", saying that yes, this is a new use for doing a skid turn with a tractor trailer, but you'll have to do it with something like a cement truck or a dump truck to get another new use credit, because we're talking "skid turns" not "tractor trailer skid turns". I might think that you're not going to do much driving at all in the future, and it's foolish to clutter your paper with a lot of individual skills, so instead I'll just let you roll this as a driving skill use, note your paper that you have accomplished a skid turn in a tractor trailer, give you new use for driving for that--but again, I'm going to be stricter in defining "new use" after that, and skid turns in heavy vehicles won't count again.
Note in the particular case of driving skills, a referee might take different approaches with different players in the same game. I've learned enough about you already to know that driving is a priority for you; I'm probably going to put a lot of attention into the details of your driving skills, one way or another, so that when you are, somewhere down the road, barreling down 95 in a gasoline tanker in the middle of the night you can suddenly decide to do a one hundred eighty degree skid turn, and that will be a skill on your sheet for you to roll. Scott won't have that skill, probably--he's never shown any particular interest in having or operating a motor vehicle, and I'm unlikely to put him in worlds where that kind of detail will matter. Thus it facilitates play for all of us that I get to make those decisions individually.
Of course, it could be hard-coded in the rules that all driving is handled the same way. That would mean that the game worked better for players (and referees) whose games went that way, and worse for those who don't. More fundamentally, though, stop and think of how many hundred of thousands of possible skills there are. How many specific skills could be discriminated under the heading "gene splicing"? How many under "design computer"? How many under "operate explosive-driven slug thrower"? Already lists and descriptions of categories of skills comprises over a third of the book; we'd need an encyclopedic listing to cover the detail of every skill. Multiverser trusts its referees to make these judgments, because the referee knows what works for him. If a particular referee wants to class every kind of gunpowder-driven gun from a matchlock to an AK-7 to the guns on the deck of the USS New Jersey as the same skill, that suggests that for purposes of his game differences between guns are not going to be that important. If he wants to require you to have separate skill in the Colt versus the Eagle, that suggests that this is a very significant skill in his game. I'll give him guidance on this, but I won't dictate it; it's more than I can do.
Why doesn't the player's opinion matter? That's the sort of question which in law would raise the objection "assumes facts not in evidence". What makes you think that your opinion does not matter to my decision? I just showed above that the fact that driving matters to you means I'm probably going to discriminate your driving skills more finely than those of others in this game. Your "opinion", expressed through your choices in play, will influence my handling of your situation. In fact, if you were to say, as you're barreling down 95 in the middle of the night, "I'm going to teach myself to do a one hundred eighty degree skid turn in this tractor trailer," that's going to tell me that in your mind this seems like a new skill--whereas if you said, "Having done a one hundred eighty degree skid turn in a flatbed once, I'm going to attempt to do the same thing with this baby," that tells me that you think it ought to be a new application of a known skill. You've thus given me your opinion on the matter, and I take that into account as I decide whether it's a new skill or a new use of an old skill, or just the use of a known skill.
Someone has to make the decision, and has to do it quickly to keep the game running smoothly. Sure, I could stop and ask your opinion, but that only slows down the game, and if we disagree, it slows it down more while we decide how to decide. We know how to decide: the referee decides. That's his job, to decide how the rules apply--and that's why in Multiverser we call him the referee.
--M. J. Young
Modify this slightly, and stick it into the rewritten MV book (I think you may have touched on this already, but not as good), or put it in whole in the Gamemaster's Guide I keep lobbying for.
And that's MY decision.
:)
FWIW.
Eric
It just reminds me of how I was told to deal with police. "No matter what happens, the cop is right, the cop has a gun. The cop has used that gun, the cop will use that gun. Even if the cop is wrong, the cop is right, the cop has a gun."
You're saying the same thing, kind of. "The referee is right. Even if the referee is wrong, the referee is right." Maybe I'm just misinterpreting something, but that's how it sounds to me.
There are a LOT of gamers that take the attitude you just described, John. And it does work as a kind of rough draft.
MJ's saying something a bit subtler. Or lets say, I would say something subtler. The Good GM strives to be an arch-mage. A good gm is asking and answering questions that the player would never even consider, and using a depth and precision that might surprise many a player. Being a GM demands more from you than being a player (which is one reason I like it.)
PT
Well, your cop mentality will keep you from being killed, so maybe it'll translate into multiverser.
I can't comment on MJ's doctoral dissertation, since I don't have the time to read it this morning. But, I will read it later. And on the influence of players, I am pretty sure that I completely changed what Scott expected out of my most recent world.
The fact remains, John, that the game reality is described to the player by the GM. It is well within the right of the player to bring up points that the GM might have overlooked or ask questions to clarify. But in the end, the GM still holds the strings to reality. If the GM abuses this power, it can result in an un-fun game. As well, if the player constantly objects to the GM it also results in an un-fun game.