Re: (TFT) 18's & broken weapons / weird stuff / variety of encounter.

[ErolB1@aol.com]

In a message dated 2/23/2004 11:43:48 PM Central Standard Time, 
rsmith@lightspeed.ca writes:

> No.  I also don't have skinny little
> rapiers break more often, nor adjust the chance
> of breaking weapons for thrusting short swords 
> as apposed to swinging long swords.  Nor do I 
> calculate the chances of the tip breaking off 
> when it hits the rock roof when you are under
> ground nor give ANY chance of breaking when I
> use a sword to block / deflect a heavy weapon
> such as an ax.  I don't even keep track of how 
> much the player's shields have been chopped up.

In truth, I can't blame you for simplifying things, since I do the same thing 
myself in simplifying the weapon-breakage rate to zero. I'm just croggled at 
the way you seem to strain at the gnat of a "break opponent's weapon" maneuver 
while swallowing the camel of "weapon breaks on an 18."

>    I notice that TFT does not have cheap
> weapons.  This is hardly surprising when a 
> sword costs only a weeks salary for a guard or
> 5 times normal living expenses for someone in
> the poor area of town.  I think that TFT swords 
> are _plenty_ cheap.

Actually, I agree with you that cheap piece-of-shit weapons should break on 
an 18. I don't consider the standard TFT weapons to be "cheap" - but that's 
something that could be justified either way. My major beef is with the way that 
non-cheap weapons (however defined in TFT terms) have close to the same chance 
of breaking: +1 "fine" weapons have fully 50% as much chance of breaking, 
despite costing 10 times more, and +2 have 17% as much chance of breaking despite 
costing 20 times more. I don't think that this is nearly enough of a 
distinction. 

>     Now I happen to think that a sword 
> breaking 1/216 times (1/1296 for a good fine
> blade) is FAR closer to realism than the 
> 1/1,000,000 number you mentioned a while ago.

There's straw in that argument - I also mentioned a 1/100,000 and a 1/10,000 
number. In fact, my bess guestimate of the real chance of breakage is 
somewhere between those two numbers for a non-piece-of-shit sword.

>    Can I prove this?  No, not unless some
>one happens across a study of how often blades
>of various qualities / alloys / cultures 
>actually broke.  (If anyone does see something
>like this please let me know.)

One place to look might be the Roman gladitorial games.

>    However, I notice that you have not got
> any studies backing you up on this point either.

Nope. I'm also in the position of defending a negative. 

>    Chris Crawford has an essay where he 
>built a Celtic sword (with a mixture of ancient
>and modern techniques).  In this, he mentioned
>that swords became longer as the metallurgy 
>improved since they were more resistant to 
>breaking.  I think that if swords broke only
>once in one million strikes, this would not 
>have been a concern.

This does not follow, leaving aside the straw of "one in a million strikes." 
If the maximum acceptable breakage rate works out to 1 per X strikes, then 
improving metallurgy will allow longer swords while keeping X the same - no 
matter what value X is. 


>    As for saying that a Roman Soldier 
>swung that (presumably fine) sword for 3 hours,
>I doubt anyone is in that much combat over a
>year.  (And if the sword does break how many
>people survive to walk home and collect?)
>
>    Consider a TFT, one on one combat.  It is 
>over in what, 15 seconds, 20 seconds?  Let us
>say that there is lots of defending, swords
>clashing and dancing around; it takes 45 seconds
>to finish the guy.
>
>    Let us further say that this Roman, is
>TOUGH.  He has good armor, fights in formation,
>picks incompetent foes, has years of experience,
>etc.  In fact, he is so good that he has a 97.5% 
>chance of winning every fight he is in.

Better to say that he has a very high chance of not dying in every fight he 
is in, due to falling back when injured. Most real-world battles, after all, 
don't involve everyone fighting to the death - that's a gaming artifact. 


>    There is a 0.2% chance that our guy is 
> still alive after 3 hours of combats.

That's a good point, but it quietly assumes that the sword will only break in 
combat, and never in practice, etc. 

>    For that matter, if all swords broke 
>once in one million swings, why would ANYONE
>offer a guarantee that this particular one would 
>not break?!?  Why bother? 
>
>    Rather than (further) belaboring the 
>point, I think I should just say that your 
>argument that swords break closer to one in a
>million swings has failed to sway me.

The strawman you attributed to me has failed to sway you: That 1 in a million 
figure was my high end estimate. But if you allow drill to have the same 
chance of breaking a sword as combat, then a "million swing" sword used for one 
hour of drill per day will have a 23% chance of breaking by the end of the year. 


Or if the sword has a one-per-million swings chance of breaking in drill, but 
a 50x greater chance of breaking in combat (one in 20,000 which is actually 
my best guess of real breakage of decent weapons), that's still a hundred times 
less likely to break in combat than "breaks on a roll of 18"

>    However, this whole argument is a 
> chimera as far as I am concerned.  if I was
> looking for realism I would play GURPS.  My
> question is 'what is fun'?

Fair enough, as long as you don't give "greater realism" as a reason for 
decent-quality weapons to break on a roll of 18.

>    Greg Costigan wrote an essay about
>game design called, "I have no words but I 
>must design", in which he creates definitions
>for a number of game design ideas.  Once thing
>he mentioned was 'variety of encounter'.  
>Magic the Gathering has a lot of variety of 
>encounter, it is the game's primary appeal.
>
>    In TFT combat, I like the fact that
>once in a while, something weird happens.  

To carry this to the illogical conclusion :-) you could create critical & 
fumble tables, and apply the former with *every* success and the latter with 
*every* failure, and get *lots* of "variety of encounter" that way. 

The thing is, too much randomness and chaos in a game can be just as bad as 
too little. 

>The
>main reason I would like interesting spell
>criticals is that after many years of TFT,
>losing full fST for spell failure is dull.

In an odd way, I agree with this. My solution was to eliminate the St cost 
for spell failure (except for missile spells). That way, wizards can save their 
St to do interesting things. But then I get the impression that your wizards 
have lots of St on tap for powering spells, compared to mine. 


>    Now I fully understand that you may
>enjoy the more realistic, reliable, ordained 
>mechanistic, (dare I say predictable?) ways 
>that melees have historically been described.
>
>    ;-)    

You'd better smilie when you say that! :-)

>    And I have no problem with that.  


I think it's more a matter of my wanting to differentiate heroes and clods. 
My house rules run heavily toward "called shot" type attacks that allow highly 
competent characters to do Cool Stuff and show up their opponents, rather than 
to "critical and fumble" rules that give everyone the same small chance of 
weird shit happening. 

>    More seriously, random crap can 
> spoil a carefully planned assault.  Some stupid
> goblin can roll a triple damage and kill a
> good PC undeservedly.  It pisses me off when
> a 18 breaks a enchanted sword and thousands
> of $ of enchantments go poof.

It seems to me that the PCs (and NPCs) are idiots if they don't do their best 
to mitigate this random crap. If they don't plan their assaults in a 
"cowardly" efficient manner that minimizes giving the goblin a chance to get lucky, if 
they don't *avoid* putting thousands of $ of enchantments in a sword without 
also putting Immunity to Break Weapon on it, then they're Stupid with a 
capital Stup.

>    But for me, the fact that sometimes
>some weird luck thing rocks everyone back and
>people are scrambling to react is one of the
>points that makes rolling dice fun.

If the mechanics are such that Random Bad Crap is inevitable in the long run, 
then you're running the gaming equivalent of an Idiot Plot if you expect 
characters to be taken by surprise when the inevitable Bad Crap happens. 

>     I mean, if I hated random crap, I
> would be playing the (very clever) Amber Role
> Playing Game.  (Diceless everything for those
> not familiar with it.)

Random crap can be good or bad for a game, depending on how much there is of 
it. As I said in an earlier post, I was inspired to go "no crits or fumbles" 
in my rolls to hit by Hero (which is even more of a "fistfull of d6's" game 
than TFT, for those not familiar with it.) What I hate is the meme of "more 
random crap is better, up to and including Nasal Demon levels of wierdness."

And <nasty mode>if you love random crap so much, why don't you play 
Rolemaster?</nasty>

>    Getting back once more to my point, 
>realistically, when an 18 was rolled, one of
>a HUNDRED things could go wrong.  GURPS got
>that part right, the sword does not always
>break, sometimes the Reptilite slips on a 
>fish.  (I also understand PvK's players who
>felt disappointed when a nothing happened 
>when they got a critical failure.  They 
>thought something cool was going to happen.)

And sometimes - often - NOTHING happens when an 18 is rolled. Or at least 
nothing beyond an ordinary failure. Most people don't crash their car every day, 
two or three times a day, after all. 

(IMO, one of the few truly great ideas in 3rd ed D&D were the rules on 
"Taking 10")

>    But the advantage of TFT is that the
>rule, 18 = weapon breaks, is SIMPLE.  It can
>be remembered.  

I submit that "18 = nothing special happens" is an even simpler rule :-)

>It is a nicely balanced 
>disaster.  Bad, but you can still draw another
>weapon and keep on fighting.  (Unlike slipping
>on a fish which can get you killed.)
>
>  I suspect that this is one of those
>taste things.  Those who like some chaos in
>combat are less troubled by 18's mean broken
>weapons / weird spell failures.  Those who 
>don't like them, don't like them.

I'd agree, except that I'd substitute "a whole lot of chaos" for that "some 
chaos." It seems to me that ordinary hits and misses, and damage dice rolling 
high or low already gives 250% of the recommended minimum daily allowance of 
random crap. 

>    My major question that started this
>whole thread off, was not are critical spell
>failures a good thing.  (Of course they are!)

Ahem. Matter of taste. 

More seriously, my main warning was intended to be against rolling a failure 
on Game Design Skill when creating those critical spell failures. Against 
creating the equivalent of the "get rich by drinking wine" Murphy, only much worse 
and without the ability call it a stretch. 

It bugs the hell out of me to see rules that imply one thing about the game 
world and then have the GM completely contradict that in his description of his 
world: "That would be about 600 rolls or six critical spell failures" "uh... 
he got lucky." Or critical spell failure rules that imply that a kingdom with 
100 wizards in it will inevitably become a blasted wasteland within a year, 
but the GM ignores that and keeps the kingdom around. 

>It was more of what were people's thoughts on
>using tables to generate them.

>    Because, I am not enamored with the
>table you have to look things up with.  It 
>just feels clunky.  However nothing else that
>gives the variety of encounter that I crave
>suggests itself to me.

>    Does anyone have any thought on this
>point?

I don't see any way to avoid tables and still get what you want. My best 
advice toward getting what you seem to want is to design a table that uses St cost 
of the spell as an input (e.g. 3d+St cost), similar to the GURPS Fight Table. 
I'd also suggest thinking up a *lot* of *very small* fumble-effects - things 
on the order of "caster's ears turn green. If they're already green, they turn 
blue" or "caster speaks in a squeeky voice for the next two turns, as if he 
inhaled helium (this doesn't affect spellcasting" or "a dozen butterflies fly 
out of the sleeves of the spell's target."  

Erol K. Bayburt
Evil Genius for a Better Tomorrow
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"