MRQ 'Atlantean' Edition?
- Thread starter Colonel_Jenkins
- Start date
Colonel_Jenkins said:
Public Apology is in order. I am sorry for the statement. The post seemed to me to be whining and pouting... a kind of emotional blackmail. I stated it overly hard. I am sorry.
I can see your point to why you posted, and can understand your disappointment. However, I felt (and it is what I felt) that you were trying to use your statements to cause Mongoose to change to the game to fit your desire rather than just making a rule change on your own. Sorry for placing the wrong emphasis on your post.
Lorgryt said:
Your math is correct, but your statement was that he was not losing chance of success, which he is. These observations are not meant to be critical, but have been argued extensively. In opposed roll chance of success depends on the three variables I described.
People have argued that 50.5 is exactly the same ratio to 30 as 101 is to 60, and that is true. Others argue that 101 is 41 more than 60, while 50.5 is only 20.5 more than 30, which is also true. But neither of these arguments directly correlate to chance of success in an opposed roll.
Lorgryt said:
This is not all a bunch of whining and arguing, people have put a lot of effort into analyzing different methods of resolving opposed rolls.
Matt himself said that use of the halving rule was very controversial in the Mongoose offices. It is not broken per se, it has two big advantages:
1) Simplicity.
2) It preserves the ratio between skills. This helps with very high skills.
For a skill of 101 (or 202, or 404) the halving mechanic penalizes the character who just crossed the threshold into halving. But it works well for very high skills, say 360 vs 320. Rather than reducing that 60 vs 20 as most methods that 'bump' or reduce by multiples of 100, halving turns it into a 90 to 80 contest, which seems a better representation of relative skill.
That being said there are ways of improving the fairness (read: decreasing the penalty for halving) that do not add complexity.
Halving may playtest well, it is simple and sounds fair on the surface. Some players will be happy with it, others will not. And I imagine many accept it as fair on face value, but will start to become suspect once they first increase a skill over 100 and start losing a lot more opposed rolls than they used to.
And lastly I think negative feedback is as productive, if not even more so in some ways, than just positive feedback. If this board were just a ra-ra cheering section for MRQ it would make the guys at Mongoose feel good, but they wouldn't learn anything about what people dislike. Fixing things that are unpopular, or at least knowing what they are, will help with future sales. Opinions are like a... achilles tendons, everyone has one or two (yea, that's it!). They don't have to cater to every nut with a complaint, but they can get a broad feel for what is popular and what is not.
Perhaps, but that does not necessarily make me feel any better. Having a main rulebook filled with "quick fixes" (to last us until the next rulebook we need to purchase in order to properly play the game) is not reassuring.
Heck, I'd actually rather them just be lousy at math than to have them merely applying quick-and-dirty fixes to stuff they know is broken...
SteveMND said:They can say a lot of things.
They may say they knew a lot of the old guard may not like what they were doing, but they were counting on us to a certain degree.
Yeah. By the time the old guard saw what was coming, they would have already bought at least the core book.
I have posted elswhere that the ads that dropped Greg Stafford's and Steve Perrin's names, especially Steve Perrin, were made to target the old guard. We are the only one's whose ears would perk up if we heard that Steve Perrin was working on a new version of RQ. It was false advertsing, pure and simple, aimed right at the old scholl RQ fans.
Colonel_Jenkins
Mongoose
Lorgryt said:
It's cool - don't worry about it. If I sound bitter, I guess it's just that I'm disappointed. But if the rule works for you, more power to you. I've gotten shy these days about buying stuff I know I'm going to have to house rule.
atgxtg said:How 'bout Glorathan Edition!
Thats more like it!
I doubt we'll see it anytime soon though, unless demand really outstripped the supply of existing books. I'm assuming they realised demand would be through the roof (I know it has been here) and printed accordingly.
Rurik said:
Sure, easy. How about a comparison of 377 vs. 333? How easy is it to divide those by 4? I am sure that you can do it, I can, but that doesn't make it easier than some of the other systems suggested.
Rurik said:
Once again the system I have suggested is forgotten, although I have yet to hear a single problem with it. Simply put. The 377 player rolls a D100 four times. The first three are added together, the last is added only if it is below 77. The player does the same except the last has to be under 33. Simplicity itself. Add in the rather plain rule that 96-00 always fails on the first roll and that any roll of 96-00 after that prohibits any more re-rolls and you are set.
So is it easier to divide 377 and 333 by four each then roll and compare? Or is it easier to add 29+53+87+61 and 34+15+74+18 (just rolled randomly). Actually just looking at the numbers I can tell the first succeeded. But to be sure [quick math] you have 230 vs. 141. Yep, the first one succeeded. This does add a lot of luck in the dice rolls, but you will always get a winner and when you are at a skill level that high does 44 points make that big a difference?
Just for fun let's try halving (twice each). So 377 is 188.5 or 188, then down to 94 vs. 333 is 166.5 or 166, then 83. Roll once each is 21 vs. 56. The second one wins.
So with Mongooses system you have to do the math before you roll and with mine you do it after. You are still doing math either way and my works out statistically whereas theirs does not.
Mongoose Steele said:
Heh heh, Tim...from the number of PMs I've gotten, you are not the only one. For all the ruffled feathers over the mechanic, you all might be surprised at how smoothly it plays. Hard math or no.
Regardless, as we say in all of our stuff...your enjoyment is what is important! Do what you need to in order to have fun!
Cheers all,
Bry
Okay, I understand it plays smoothly, but I couldn't disagree more. You could reverse everything and say that you have to roll over your skill to succeed and that you get worse with experience and it would play just as smooth, but it would not be fun at all. I am telling you now. Advancing your skill and having your chance of success go down will not be fun for very many people no matter how smooth it is.
I have already stated my fix several times and this is not a deal breaker for me. Mine copy is still on order (just need to get Amazon to actually ship it to me :x ). But if you think this will not be a big problem in the future you are mistaken.
My two clacks.
Lord Twig said:
Forgotten, or just not controversial enough to discuss?
Actually this sounds good to me. But how about this as an alternative that doesn't require math:
Adjust which dice you roll for opposed tests over 100%.
If the highest skill is between up to 200%m use a D20 in the tens column. This will generate a roll from 1 to 200
If the highest skill is up to 300, use a D30 in the tens column.
Up to 400, roll a D4 for the 100's column and also d%. Treat a 4 as a 0, and you get a number from 1 to 400
500 - more difficult, but roll 3D10 and halve the first number for a 100's column of 1 to 5.
And so on. In my own theoretical campaign (I say theoretical because I now think it unlikely I will ever play MRQ), skills would only very rarely reach 200% and never more than 300%, so I think this is the simplest method of all. I haven't done a statistical analysis, but I suspect it works just fine.
Any thoughts on that?
Cobra
Interesting, but how would you do 110%? If you rolled a d200 (d20+d10) you would have a 45% chance of failing the roll. This would be essentially the same as halving. The thing that keeps my system balanced is that the extra rolls over 100% can never hurt your chances, only help.
For my own game I doubt I will see skills very far over 100%, but I definitely expect that there will be some. So how the rules work just over 100% will be very important to me. While how they work for skills over 300% or 400% will most likely never come into play.
For my own game I doubt I will see skills very far over 100%, but I definitely expect that there will be some. So how the rules work just over 100% will be very important to me. While how they work for skills over 300% or 400% will most likely never come into play.
Actually I think the simplest solution -- not that I think one is needed any longer, now that I see the reasoning behind it -- is this:
Just roll d%. Use criticals and fumbles. As skills go up, so does their chance to crit while their chance for automatic failure goes down. Crits trump successes, successes trump failures, failures trump fumbles. With two normal successes, he who wins by the most wins. With two failures, they both fail.
No math unless of two successes, then it's just determining degree of success.
So in the case of 350% vs. 125%, if the rolls are 34 and 50, the 350% wins because 34 is a crit. If the rolls are 44 and 50, the 350% wins because 350-44 > 125-50. If the rolls are 95 and 98 the 350% wins because 98 is a failure.
That seems totally simple to me.
Just roll d%. Use criticals and fumbles. As skills go up, so does their chance to crit while their chance for automatic failure goes down. Crits trump successes, successes trump failures, failures trump fumbles. With two normal successes, he who wins by the most wins. With two failures, they both fail.
No math unless of two successes, then it's just determining degree of success.
So in the case of 350% vs. 125%, if the rolls are 34 and 50, the 350% wins because 34 is a crit. If the rolls are 44 and 50, the 350% wins because 350-44 > 125-50. If the rolls are 95 and 98 the 350% wins because 98 is a failure.
That seems totally simple to me.
Deathdealer
Mongoose
iamtim said:
That's how I'll do it.
iamtim said:
That would indeed work, but if the 350 succeeds there is no need to compare rolls. If the 125% crits, he wins. If he does not he loses as there is no way he can overcome the 225% lead that the 350% guy has on him, no matter what he rolls. Overall not a bad system though.
iamtim said:
Yeah. It is "simple". The problem is that as skill levels go up, the randomness of the result increases. A lucky roll becomes more important then skill values. Some players will like this. Some will hate it.
Another way to look at your example is that 12% of the time, the 125% skilled person will critical. When that happens, the 350% character has only a 35% chance to succeed. While statisically you can say this is correct, in practice you end up with a great deal of randomness everytime you roll the dice. I've actually played with this (sorta). During a time period in our RQ game, the GM introduced a martial art ability that made attacks and parrys work more like attacks and dodge. So a special required a special or better to parry, and a critical required a critical or better to parry. It worked great as a special combat ability... right up until you had two fighters with the ability trying to fight eachother. At that point it became a luck-fest and was totally unplayable.
That's essentially the same system you are suggesting here. That success level trumps skill difference. I think that for *some* skills, that works. But for most, it just doesn't.
I still believe that the best way to manage this is to simply subtract enough from both skills to make the highest equal 100 or subtract enough from the highest to make the lowest equal 5, whichever subtracts less. So in the case of a 350% versus a 125%, you'd have a 230% versus a 5%. This prevents the lower skill from still retaining a statisically significant chance of winning just because of sheer luck. Sure. He still can, but it's far less probable, and I think that's correct when there's such a huge skill discrepancy.
Twig's suggestion of adding up dice works as well (at least it accurately reflects the relative skills). Lots of die rolling though. I think it's easier to subtract 120 from both values in this case, then add up a bunch of D100s.
Lord Twig said:
Hmmm... Lord Twig, I think I like this suggestion... but how badly would it be affected if we added 50 per 100%'s of skill to just one D100 roll (to reduce the number of rolls and math)? Rather than rolling 4 times we'd roll once and add 150 - in these cases, taking just your first roll, we'd have 377 rolling 150 + 29 for 179 to 150 + 34 for 333 skill character, but since 34 is a failure for him, we don't add the 34, leaving him with just 150. If there's a difference of 200 or more between the skills, suddenly only crits/fumbles matter. Is that a good tradeoff for less addition, I wonder? Or how about just adding (3d10 x 10) + 1d100 for simpler math?
-al
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