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Old 05-15-2022, 12:57 PM   #1
cupbearer
 
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Default Info roll crit fails

Hi,

I like the idea that on a critical fail, the GM lies, representing misremembered facts, that's a pretty unique mechanic.

the only issue to me is that at the extremes the math might break down. A person who has effective skill 3 for instance, will misremember information on a 13 or higher, that seems too high to me. I think the odds of not knowing should be higher but not nescessarily getting the info wrong.

what do you guy/gals think?
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Old 05-15-2022, 01:10 PM   #2
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The only issue to me is that at the extremes the math might break down. A person who has effective skill 3 for instance, will misremember information on a 13 or higher, that seems too high to me. I think the odds of not knowing should be higher but not necessarily getting the info wrong.
I've met people who were completely wrong far more reliably than that on subjects they didn't know about, but were happy to express opinions on.
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Old 05-15-2022, 05:04 PM   #3
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I've met people who were completely wrong far more reliably than that on subjects they didn't know about, but were happy to express opinions on.
We probably need some sort of skill 'specialization' descriptor, or something like that, to represent people who were taught or otherwise learned a significant amount of bad information about one or more specific subjects. It does come up often enough in real life that someone might want to simulate it in-game.
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Old 05-15-2022, 05:08 PM   #4
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GURPS Social Engineering: Social Media
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Old 05-15-2022, 05:47 PM   #5
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GURPS Social Engineering: Social Media
😂 that is amazing!
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Old 05-15-2022, 08:00 PM   #6
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the only issue to me is that at the extremes the math might break down. A person who has effective skill 3 for instance, will misremember information on a 13 or higher, that seems too high to me. I think the odds of not knowing should be higher but not nescessarily getting the info wrong.
I actually instituted mandatory knowledge checks for all delvers in my DFRPG game because by the books, only the smart guys need to roll about monsters and thus only the smart guys can have critical failures and get things wrong. Which weirdly made the IQ 16 wizard feel stupider than the IQ 8 minotaur barbarian.

After the barbarian started making default Hidden Lore checks and critically failing about 50% of the time... well, actually, the players still kept believing whatever weird thing I passed along to barbarian's player while the wizard player shouted the facts at them but was ignored. Not much funnier than watching a bunch of delvers get into a fist fight with standard giant rats because the dumb guy thought they were rust rats that would destroy everyone's weapons.

tl;dr: the increased critical failure chance is an important mechanic for making the less informed people feel like they are less informed.
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Old 05-16-2022, 06:17 AM   #7
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Default Re: Info roll crit fails

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
GURPS Social Engineering: Social Media
Exactly! :-D I've seen an awful lot of things stated as scientific facts in discussions about the coronavirus which give the impression that somebody got their ideas about biology from the technobabble in a superhero film. It's not only the anti-vaccine faction, either!

Crunching some numbers. To have effective skill level 3, the example the OP gave, a character would actually have to both have below-average intelligence and no points in the skill. No points would mean they knew nothing about the subject besides things they happened to remember having seen on TV, or, even more unreliable, things they happened to remember hearing from someone else who remembered once seeing it on TV. And they don't know enough about it to know which of said scraps of hearsay are likely to be true.
13 or more is still only about 25% of the time.
So it doesn't seem too surprising if when they try to make a wild guess about it, 25% of the time (13 or more is 25% of the time) they come up with something they think they heard somewhere but it's wrong.

Of course, this only happens if they don't know they don't know enough about the subject and not make a roll. If a character habitually thought they were better informed than they were, then you might give them Overconfidence (Info Rolls Only), or, for instance, Delusion (My maths skills are perfectly OK, don't fuss).

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Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have
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Old 05-16-2022, 07:30 AM   #8
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Crunching some numbers. To have effective skill level 3, the example the OP gave, a character would actually have to both have below-average intelligence and no points in the skill. No points would mean they knew nothing about the subject besides things they happened to remember having seen on TV, or, even more unreliable, things they happened to remember hearing from someone else who remembered once seeing it on TV. And they don't know enough about it to know which of said scraps of hearsay are likely to be true.
I don't think it's quite that bad. At least at TL8, it would be assumed that IQ includes general education, which in most Western cultures means that you got through secondary school. So you would have been exposed to whatever general science was included in the curriculum. On the other hand, while a college prep track in the US could include physics and chemistry, and the tracks for students in other countries who passed exams to get into an academic curriculum would as well, a student with GURPS IQ 9 probably wouldn't get into that track; their general science would be very general indeed. But they would have whatever they remembered from school lectures as their default Physics/TL8-3 and Chemistry/TL8-3.
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Old 05-16-2022, 09:38 AM   #9
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Default Re: Info roll crit fails

Above average intelligence is worse for 'being wrong and being opinionated' because it opens up a lot more mental gymnastics, which might even sound convincing.

It's also easier to drag those people into smoke sceen complexity because simple thinking is too base for them.
(In other words, you can drag some 'yokel' into a cult, but you can also drag a 'smarter than the average bear' into one, usually those are not offical though, more of a memetic implantation)

I'd rather face an opinionated, but exasperated from arguing 'midwit' (worst thng they seem to do is start blatanty lying ) than someone who's got a whole library of BS tactics in their mind because smart people tend to get into more verbal arguments, and are thus exposed to all sorts of BS, and it's like that saying about exterminators.

If you spend all day around roaches, you risk getting into them as an interest (paraphrased)

Some of the more tragic things happen in such 'ruts'.
And the more BSing goes on on some topic, the more likely it is that the victim of this rut thinks that nothing is sincere anymore, and might fall into insincerity himself.

Lowest hanging fruit examples are theological debates, I won't say anything about it further, but that arena, for example, is littered with mental gymnastics which are pretty much mandatory, that sincerity sometimes feels like an alien concept.

And they're all good people, too. And smart. (and me saying that is not me trying to be an atheist or anything, it's just that the field itself is highly chaotic, a sort of mire, in a way but everyone has ways to rationalize things)

Last edited by Lovewyrm; 05-16-2022 at 09:41 AM.
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Old 05-16-2022, 02:45 PM   #10
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I don't think it's quite that bad. At least at TL8, it would be assumed that IQ includes general education, which in most Western cultures means that you got through secondary school. . . . But they would have whatever they remembered from school lectures as their default Physics/TL8-3 and Chemistry/TL8-3.
In many cases, that is "nothing". There is a terrible tendency for elementary science to be taught by people who don't grasp how it joins up and how fitting parts of it together explains things. So it comes over to the students as stuff they have to memorise, which all seems very arbitrary, and hard to relate to.
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