Re: (TFT) week 1 SP "Intelligence"

["Jay Carlisle" <selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com>]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jay Carlisle" 
> Subject: (TFT) week 1
> Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 03:17:07 +0800
> 
> 
> Schedule for week 1, Jan '08

< snip >
 
> Prepare speculative post "Intelligence".
> 

Still more notes than essay.
I'm curious as to the List's opinions on this.


McLuhan's tetrad. The tetrad allowed McLuhan to apply four laws, framed as questions, to a wide spectrum of mankind's endeavors, and thereby give us a new tool for looking at our culture.

The first of these questions or laws is;

"What does it (the medium or technology) extend?"

The second question is; 

"What does it make obsolete?"

The third question asks; 

"What is retrieved?" 

The fourth question asks; 

"What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?"


Now I want to apply this form to game mechanics.
McLuhan viewed technology as an extension of the body.

I propose that the "mechanics" or rules of a RPG, are mainly extensions of the much smaller subset of rules or "mechanics" that describe the Players Character.

Fully understanding the rules that deal with the compleat discription of the Character is a key to manageable and interesting development.
Notice I said Manageable and not Controlled.

Think Joe Average naked in a field.
No Talents, no Spells.
Now we pull up the Action table in Melee.

Okay using this I can still walk him around. Take clumsy swings at things. Jump. Wait for it to get dark and find how many hexes I can see...

hummm...

I notice all these rules arn't in one place.
Their sorta scattered around.

That's part of what PlainText is about.
A little consolodation.


Also of note.
I've brought this up before and I'm sure there's some stuff on the list about it I haven't found yet, but I'm quite serious about quantifying those Statistics.

What is a point of St?

Well you can take damage with it, cast spells with it, you get...

Woah!
I don't wanna know what you can do with it.
I can read.
I wanna know what 1 point of Strength means in TFT.
Exactally.
I don't care how it's defined.
I can convert.
Outta the three, this is the one that is gonna be easiest.

The BugBear for me is IQ.

I've done a lot of reading.

That little World Book table I put on the Wiki is still the best relation I can find.

And even that is too old.

Research over the past decade is showing a suprising amount of cognitive ability in the "wild kingdom", which is suprising that it's suprising because both sets cognitive abilities sprang from the same Nature.

I see no reason to call animal intelligence a separate scale.

Also IQ is probably the most loosely quantified of the three because it must cover everything except physical movement in the game.
So the statistic isn't just an Intelligence Quotient.
But I'm afraid that's the best I'm gonna get.


And it does help answer questions like;

"What's the biggest fireball a super-intelligent supercomputer could throw, if it could learn spells?"

A big part of the answer is in quantifying how much IQ, in points, is needed to describe the Computer.

Thinking in units of Joe(s) can be helpful here.

What does it mean to have a million IQ?

What about the sum total IQ of Earth?

Are there Mega-stats, in the way one can think of mega-bucks?

Do stats have a limit?

There are implcations both ways, but I feel a well "balanced" game world tends to stear play away from these limits through intrest in the focus of the world itself.
This is easier said than done.

A final note.

Many Clasic fantasy stories refer to a "Deep" magic.
This seems to be some underlieing thread, or theme in magic that becomes obscured in some way when a figure persues it for the Power it represents.
Quantifying stats is a closely corolated question to this concept in RPGs.

And you know, I really just HATE it when you say game and people assume "computer".


Jay

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