Appeal to SJG

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by dgrm4

Based on this logic then why have any rules at all? I mean, aren't our players going to hoze things up regardless of all the rules we create? The best advice either written or verbal to give GMS is this "RUN AS MANY GAMES AS YOU CAN". Experience is the best teacher.

There is in fact a fairly long discussion of this question in GURPS Social Engineering. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

One of the reasons I drifted from GURPS to Rolemaster Standard System was that it was harder for players to build a useless character there. The system does more to focus character design. Even so, I have this one player who could build a useless character in TWERPS.

There's no such thing as a "useless character". It's part of your job as the GM to (a) provide guidance to the players during character creation so that their characters fit into your game, and (b) make sure every character has something to do in the game. If you aren't doing that, it's hardly the player's fault that the character doesn't fit into the game world.

[Nymdok]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Matching monsters to PCs game-mechanically is futile, because mindset makes more of a difference than stats. Examples:

The Rebuttal:
Respectfully, I disagree. Matching combat encounters and monsters to your PCs, although difficult, is definitely worth doing and I highly recommend it.

First, please allow me to treat your examples.

For the difference in tactics, there is no real way to gage that mathematically a priori. However, you can look at the outcomes of previous fights where you had the knobs on the creatures set at certain difficulty and use that to make finer adjustments to the probabilities, either increasing or decreasing the difficulty.

The same can easily be said about rules mastery, but it is the GM's job to adjudicate those successfuly. If the GM makes monsters that have those off-switch type weak points, then he accepts those risks. If Hidden Lore is deciding the outcomes of combat, the GM needs to consider why that is the case and if that is suitable to the game he wants to run. Remember also that the GM, based on the sucess, reveals that information to his players in a magnitude and specificity that HE sees fit. This is a larger adjudication issue.

As for the Surly GM/Players, that can happen regardless of the situation and is a poor argument against monster design guidelines. If everyone at the table throws their hands up and says forget this Game/Genre/System/Particular group, then its over. No monster design system will help or hinder this, nor do I think that anything play supplement could guarantee against this situation. Its not a rules or mechanics issue. Balancing combat encounters is.


The Counter Argument
Second, Allow me to support the other side of the argument, as I normally do that alot round these parts.

Combat in GURPS is a many varied thing and if we all retreat from the table to build 150 point warriors, we will likely all comeback with our own very different interpretations of what that means. This doesn't let the GM off the hook for designing interesting encounters, some of which involve combat.

For all its subtlety and variance, in the end (and stop me if you've heard me say this one before) GURPS combat is about Attack vs Active Defense, DMG vs DR and HP.

If you dont successfully swing you dont successfully hit.
If your Dmg doesnt get through the DR and reduce the HP your no closer to done.

I know this is shocking blasphemy to many, and keep in mind, I state it as the simplest most reduced form of 2 identical drones on a featureless plane beating the crap out of each other. It is analagous to saying Area=Square of the length of the side. You know its only true for a square, but using that as a starting point, you can extend it through logic to an integral that will encompass irregular shapes.

If I begin to fiddle with the knobs, and all other things equal, I set one of my Drones to a Higher ST, it becomes more and more likely that in the long run, over many fights, the Stronger one will win. We can expect it to be the likely out come. THis is no different than making an unmodified skill roll with a skill > 10 and expecting to be sucessful. How much more certain does it become for +1 St? +20 ST?

So what then happens if I set the other drones Skill Higher? How much higher? 5 levels higher? 20? What can I expect the outcome to be then? How can I vary these key factors and others and in that variation, what can I expect the outcome to be.

Where Do I set the knobs so that my Players arent bashing creampuffs nor are the getting bashed as such themselves?

How can I build custom monsters when I simply dont know how? I can build neat abilities, but have no idea what to do for magnitude. Is a poison that Does 1d per second for 5 seconds and is resited by HT -3 appropriate for my party?

Its your fault, you havent been gming for 50 years.

Knowing how to set those knobs and what to expect for outcomes are one of the keys to being a good GM and knowing the system. Quite often its suggested that the only way to get better at it is to GM for a long time over many battles. This is not helpful advice. People just cant cram that much experience into a shorter timespace to become a better GM.

Thats why a creature design system is important. Thats why combat balance is important. Because we dont have 50 years to get it right, and the game starts next week. A system to get us into the ballpark so that we can let our experience do the fine adjustments is definately in order and a goal worth pursuing.

What Ive done.

If you've read this far, and your interested, theres a link in my sig where you can read about my efforts. Even though it hasnt been updated in a year, math doesnt change much :)


Look around on these boards and you can find a few worked examples Ive done with a few people. Its been working very well for our Group.

Nymdok

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by dgrm4

Based on this logic then why have any rules at all?

To resolve whatever crazy actions the players call out for their PCs in a clear way that everybody can live with, basically. Those actions don't have to be tactically sound, related to combat at all, or even sensible. All they have to be is resolvable.

Rules are a tool for resolution, not a tool for managing power. That's something lots of people seem to miss, but it's true nonethless.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

For all its subtlety and variance, in the end (and stop me if you've heard me say this one before) GURPS combat is about Attack vs Active Defense, DMG vs DR and HP.

If you dont successfully swing you dont successfully hit.
If your Dmg doesnt get through the DR and reduce the HP your no closer to done.

I know this is shocking blasphemy to many, and keep in mind, I state it as the simplest most reduced form of 2 identical drones on a featureless plane beating the crap out of each other. It is analagous to saying Area=Square of the length of the side. You know its only true for a square, but using that as a starting point, you can extend it through logic to an integral that will encompass irregular shapes.

If I begin to fiddle with the knobs, and all other things equal, I set one of my Drones to a Higher ST, it becomes more and more likely that in the long run, over many fights, the Stronger one will win. We can expect it to be the likely out come. THis is no different than making an unmodified skill roll with a skill > 10 and expecting to be sucessful. How much more certain does it become for +1 St? +20 ST?

Your ST example has a flaw in it, but I don't think it really hurts your argument so much as supports it.

I've been building some martial artists, and I've been surprised at how effectively high DX, highly accurate characters can get around having low ST. They'll do things like target the chinks in your armor or make a run-around attack on your vitals and you're just as dead if a brawny guy hammered you with a maul. Likewise, I've been surprised at how effective high ST characters can simply batter down defenses.

The point, then, is that tactics trump your balance model, and a smart fighter will beat the point spread every time. This is actually important and it's the mark of a good game: If GURPS really boiled down into a simple, easy-to-understand formula, you could let a computer run the combat simulation and just spit out the results. WoD works this way, more or less, but GURPS really doesn't.

This doesn't obviate the need for what you describe, though. As you point out, a novice GM doesn't know these things. I'm an experienced GM, and I've been learning a lot as I develop Cherry Blossom Rain. There's no way someone who just picked up GURPS could do what I'm doing unless I showed them how I did it.

I don't think we need a monster-design book. A monster-design book is too limited in scope: It'll help the Fantasy guys, and it might help the Horror guys (though Horror has never been about balanced encounters), and it might help the space opera guys, but it'll have very limited utility in martial arts games, action games, supers games, wild west games, or pulp adventures. No, we need a discussion on how to make combat interesting. Your work ultimately focuses on this, not monster design, and it's really what would help the sorts of things you're talking about.

How to balance an encounter is important: If you're fighting a 250 point guy with skill 16 in two-handed sword, weapon master, Enhanced Parry and ST 14, how do we challenge him without overwhelming him? But more than that, how do we keep our fights dynamic and interesting? What alternate strategies can we use to challenge this guy in different ways? I mean, once you've found one working model (sufficient DR to avoid most, but not all, of the damage, coupled with enough defense to force the guy to Beat down your defenses), that doesn't mean you should use it over and over again, because your fights will become predictable.

• How do we balance an encounter?
• How do we use different combat strategies to keep our balanced encounters interesting and varied?
• How do we run an unbalanced encounter while keeping the game interesting (how do show that the BBEG is awesome without killing the players? How do you make a minion-fight more than just "I roll the dice and another one dies"?)
• What are some innovative strategies for using disadvantages against PCs in battle?
• What are some quick an easy ways to use the scenery and setting against the players (or how might they take advantage of it?)
• How do we tie the story into the fight to give it a greater context?

What we need is a battle bible, a book where GURPS veterans like Kromm outlines how he uses the system to make interesting battles, and how we might do the same. GURPS Powers was so eye-opening because it showed us ways to use advantages that most of us had never thought of. Martial arts was the same for skills. This book would do the same with things like modifiers, the tactical combat system, and NPC design.

I'm not sure if it would work well as an actual book, though. Things like Play Dirty and Suppressed Transmission sell magazine subscriptions, but the don't seem to push books. Still, I'd love to see something like this for Pyramid. We already had Peter Dell'Orto's discussion of how to build high DX or high ST martial artists, but those articles are no longer available except to those of us who were subscribers. I think something like that would be very welcome.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Matching combat encounters and monsters to your PCs, although difficult, is definitely worth doing and I highly recommend it.

Please reread what I actually wrote: "Matching monsters to PCs game-mechanically is futile." I didn't assert that it was impossible to adjust monsters to particular PCs. In fact, I said that you could do exactly that by "knowing your fellow gamers and [being willing] to adapt stats on the fly." I simply don't believe that it makes a lot of sense to seek quantitative mechanisms here. We're discussing a qualitative process unless you greatly restrict the possible input values by allowing only a tiny subset of abilities and offering the players a limited palette of choices. Digital games do this well and arena-based tabletop games do so adequately, but true face-to-face roleplaying games do it extremely poorly unless you're willing to mute the "roleplaying" part.

Originally Posted by Nymdok

However, you can look at the outcomes of previous fights

This is trial-and-error, not something that you can formalize in a system so that the error part doesn't happen in the first place. That was precisely my point. The GMs who most need advice haven't run a single fight with that player group yet. The GM who has many past experiences with his current players rarely needs help and, in my experience, somewhat resents being told how to do his job.

Originally Posted by Nymdok

For all its subtlety and variance, in the end (and stop me if you've heard me say this one before) GURPS combat is about Attack vs Active Defense, DMG vs DR and HP.

So where exactly does Mind Control fit in? Or area-effect sleep attacks that are too large to flee and that cause binary unaffected/defeated decisions based on, say, resistance vs. Will? Or just trying to use Fast-Talk in combat to win the fight diplomatically? There are also endless corner cases, such as grappling (which can end the fight without damage or DR arising, even if attacks and defenses are involved) and explosives (which are so imprecise that even a near miss is a hit, defense largely doesn't matter, but damage and DR still come up). Plus there are tactical considerations; e.g., surprise bypasses defense, but how do you quantify surprise? And then there's the stuff out of left field, like the Unkillable 3/Time Jumper combo that came up in another thread.

The problem with GURPS is that it does support a far wider range of factors than you're looking at. In fact, I'd consider attack/defense -> damage/armor combat a small subset of all combat. Once you toss in the impact of every spell, power, and so forth – and I've run campaigns with that kind of breadth – you realize that there are too many dimensions to the space for easy solutions. The compounded effects of many branching dice rolls can add chaos to the mix, too.

This is relevant here because the essence of interesting monster design isn't balancing hit rates and damage potential, but dreaming up weird, wild ways to set those factors aside and make something else – brains, willpower, scariness, holiness, tactical surprise, etc. – the pivotal issue. Just add Terror to a monster to see a simple example: The typical group of PCs will have widely varying Fright Check targets, and because this variability is compounded with a roll on a table, and the table result is itself often a roll, no two encounters will be much alike. Two fighters with Will 9 and Will 13 but otherwise identical skills, in a fight with something that has Terror, will likely win or lose based on their Will difference even if nothing else in that battle affects Will.

Or look at Luck: What the player uses it for matters, and if it's Ridiculous Luck, the length of the battle in real time will start to matter, too . . . which can lead to cascades like the last use of Ridiculous Luck in a big fight setting up a delay that justifies another use. Now toss luck-related abilities on several PCs, and several of their foes, too, and it gets very weird.

—

I'm so dead-set against this because I've seen too many cases where the math wouldn't have helped at all! An example:

In my last campaign, I had a player I'll call "Random Guy." His only predictable trait was that he wasn't predictable. He had a special love for Gizmos, Wild Talent, and other "means what I say it does when I say it" abilities. He also had Extraordinary Luck.

In fights where I had calibrated the combat numbers to the PCs, this player was inevitably a wild card. Sometimes he would make randomly bad choices that would see him become a net liability, multiplying enemy force. Other times, he'd end the battle with a Hail Mary that rarely had to do with damage. And since that campaign was high-stakes, this affected everyone. When he wasn't making sense, every other PC was compromised and punching below weight; when he got lucky, the numbers didn't matter much. I could predict his effect averaged over 10 or 100 combats, but since things going bad on combat #1 would mean nobody living to see combats #2-100, that wasn't useful. Instead, I had to fudge a lot.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

we need a discussion on how to make combat interesting

This, on the other hand, I agree with. Of course, if it were a book, there would have to be an entire chapter on fudging outcomes to cope with bad player tactics and looney player types. Because honestly, I've never seen PCs killed "accidentally" by a GM who was willing to fudge, only by a GM who doggedly played by the numbers while the players were ignoring numbers and shooting for "feel" or "cool factor." Getting everybody to play by the numbers kills what's fun about RPGs. Getting everybody to accept fluidity as part of the social contract at the gaming table is fun for anyone who isn't treating an RPG like a war game.

[David Johansen]

Originally Posted by robkelk

There's no such thing as a "useless character". It's part of your job as the GM to (a) provide guidance to the players during character creation so that their characters fit into your game, and (b) make sure every character has something to do in the game. If you aren't doing that, it's hardly the player's fault that the character doesn't fit into the game world.

Okay, that'd be fine if "experienced gamers" would accept a little instruction or direction once in a while but in my experience they don't.

Now this particular player's aproach to creating a character in any system is to sit down with a note pad and copy every last advantage, disadvantage, and skill in the book and then put as few points in any of them as possible so as to have the absolutely broadest range of abilities possible. So in GURPS he rarely manages a score over 11 in anything.

USELESS CHARACTER

Anyhow, Dr. Kromm and Nymdok, the thing is that a balanced point system is a holy grail of wargames and the only one I ever thought really accomplished it was Legendary Battles which was balanced with millions of computer simulations. Most battles end with one figure left on the table. It's also a very dry game with a very narrow set of parameters as these things go.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Kromm

This is trial-and-error, not something that you can formalize in a system so that the error part doesn't happen in the first place. That was precisely my point. The GMs who most need advice haven't run a single fight with that player group yet. The GM who has many past experiences with his current players rarely needs help and, in my experience, somewhat resents being told how to do his job.

You could conceivably develop a not-quite-useless Challenge Rating metric, but it would merely make this trail and error method arrive at a balance slightly sooner and give a GM a slightly more mechanical way of balancing to next encounter.

For example, say that whatever formula you use gives a given combat encounter a rating of 5. That means pretty much nothing in itself. But if a GM uses that encounter and finds the party walks all over it without breaking a sweat, he knows that to challenge them next time he'll need to use an encounter with a higher rating. However, encounters with the same rating (even the same encounter) may be quite a challenge to a party made up mostly of non-combat types, or even to the exact same party of characters played by less tactical minded players. On the other hand, a party with a good negotiator might not have to fight at all.

However, it probably doesn't belong in Bestiary, but in a book of GMing advice, as it would include things like "encounter begins with players in compromised position: +2 CR" and "enemy has vulnerability to party's abilities: -1 CR."

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by RyanW

You could conceivably develop a not-quite-useless Challenge Rating metric, but it would merely make this trail and error method arrive at a balance slightly sooner and give a GM a slightly more mechanical way of balancing to next encounter.

For example, say that whatever formula you use gives a given combat encounter a rating of 5. That means pretty much nothing in itself. But if a GM uses that encounter and finds the party walks all over it without breaking a sweat, he knows that to challenge them next time he'll need to use an encounter with a higher rating. However, encounters with the same rating (even the same encounter) may be quite a challenge to a party made up mostly of non-combat types, or even to the exact same party of characters played by less tactical minded players. On the other hand, a party with a good negotiator might not have to fight at all.

However, it probably doesn't belong in Bestiary, but in a book of GMing advice, as it would include things like "encounter begins with players in compromised position: +2 CR" and "enemy has vulnerability to party's abilities: -1 CR."

Except encounter rating 5 might have been a cake walk does means another type of rating 5 would be, it just their attack vector had a different synergy was the point. not not they more powerful, it just they a diferent type of power, give the same no ears and suddenly that sonic attack can even scratch them any more.