How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Maxperson]

No one has even suggested this. Stop jumping to extremes.

I mean, you and @pemerton have done that to me several times each in this thread. It seems a bit hypocritical to object to someone doing it to you.

 

[Cadence]

Re: stats discussion

I commonly point out to my intro classes that a former governor of ours was a master at switching between different stats in a single speech in order to suit their purposes. Mean income and median housing prices to show it was cheap to live some places. One set of crime rate numbers from this year compared to another's from last year to make it sound like all crime was skyrocketing.

But really, it happens when only a single stat is chosen too. Why choose one of mean or median? Why choose one of percent change vs. percentage point change? Why choose that particular axes for your graph? Sometimes it is because the author literally hasn't thought about it, and in others it is because they definitely have.

In general, descriptive statistics should be both concise and not misleading. If using just one number as a summary doesn't give an adequate picture of something (like how risky a change in medication is), then one should use more than one number. Are there any reasons in general to say something doubled vs. something increased by x, when you can just say "went from 1/million to 2/million", or "5% to 10%". Similarly, in other cases, just say "45% to 50%", or "0% to 1%", "$1 to $2", "$1 trillion to $2 trillion" or whatever the case may be?

 

[Maxperson]

So what? You said that you couldn’t think of an example where natural language cause an issue. I provided an example.

Of where it doesn't cause an issue. At least not as a general thing. I suppose individuals here and there might be unable to understand what "hard to hit" means, but most of us understand that the creature is.......................hard to hit. Not having the exact numbers isn't a problem.

This makes no sense. You’re basically condemning use of any and all jargon, any and all descriptors that can be used to convey a complex idea more quickly.

No. I'm saying jargon should be restricted to conversations where only those who know and use it are present. A forum where anyone is free to join the conversation isn't the place for it.

I’m talking about you saying you’d do it differently than me and why. How it shouldn’t be common knowledge and so on.

That isn't telling you that you are doing it wrong. Telling you how I'd do it is far from telling you that you are wrong for doing it in your game. Thanks for finally admitting that I didn't do that to you.

When do folks not explain the term when asked?

Why make people ask when you know those people are present in these threads? That and lot of people won't ask. They'll just fail to understand what is being said and move on to something else. It's basically gating the conversation behind jargon.

And at what point does it become the responsibility of individuals to learn this stuff instead of the responsibility of others to explain it to them?

On a forum like this, it doesn't.

My example was based on @pemerton’s (and I’m sure at this point he’s glad I did that…) where the purpose of the circle seemed obvious.

When challenged on this, I said I often default to that kind of GMing because I’m generally uninterested in keeping a situation like that mysterious. I’m more interested in what the PCs will try and do about it rather than them trying to even figure out what’s going on. Depending on the situation and the details, I might address all the players, or I might select the player of the character most familiar with such things and tell them.

Regardless of exactly how I handled it, I can assure you that plenty of consideration would go into it.

After the fact. You will just hand out the information and justify it later, which is the opposite of what was said above. Deciding what the character would know has to be done before the fact. If you simply let them know things and justify it later, you've given no thought to what the character would know before you let them know it.

That's not to say you didn't have a reason to give the information out. In this case not liking to keep situations like that mysterious. It's just that the reason wasn't about what the character would or wouldn't know. After the fact justification doesn't change that.

 

[Maxperson]

Well here's my response: if someone tells me that the fighter is only 5% better against the armoured knight than the guard, that will likewise lead some (many?) to make erroneous judgements. Because, in fact, the fighter is twice as good, and the normal way to convey "twice as good" using percentages is 100% better, not 5% better.

The fact that the increments of ability are units on a 20-sided die, and so in that sense are 5% increments, is not relevant to understanding which of the two warriors is better able to confront the knight, and how much better one is than the other.

I mean, suppose that the numbers were 99-00, vs 00 only, on a d%. The first is still twice as good as the second, and it does nothing but spread fog to say that they are only 1% better, which would imply being trivially better rather than twice as good.


Is it a corner case? And as I noted, the chance against AC 5 is 20% better.

Even against AC 10, the fighter is 10% better than the 0-level guard (11 chances in 20, compared to 10 chances in 20). That is not trivial if - for instance - the characters are assaulted by half-a-dozen patrons in a bar. Suppose that the fighter has AC 4, and so the 0-level patrons have a 1 in 5 chance to hit (4 chances in 20, or 17+ required). The fighter can expect 1 to 2 hits in the first round, which he may well withstand, and with a win of initiative can get in the first attack in the second round. The chance of hitting at least one AC 10 labourer, over two attacks, is 319/400 for the fighter. The chance of hitting two is 121 in 400. For the guard, the chance is 3/4 for at least one hit, and 1 in 4 for two hits.

Those are not trivial changes in the expected outcome.

This also shows that the comparison to a heart attack is irrelevant. The roll to hit in AD&D is not once-and-done. It is rolled, each round, until the combat ends. Having a double chance to hit the armoured knight is far from nothing. Suppose that the knight is trying to break through a gate, and the other warrior is able to shoot from above: so each round, we test the knight's strength and roll for the warrior to hit. Who would you rather have holding that position - the guard, or the fighter who has twice the chance to hit?

They are entirely trivial. No matter how you try to spin the statistics, you can't get around the fact that the fighter in all cases(except AC 0) will only hit 1 extra time every 20 swings on average, and in AD&D that means 20 rounds of fighting. 1 extra hit every 20 rounds is so trivial that it won't even matter in 99.9% of fights.

Fights that go 20+ rounds are extremely rare. Probably because they are boring as hell.

 

[Maxperson]

Saying something exists within a setting isn't an automatic guarantee that a person is going to know about it. If my character came across a circle etched into the ground and finds themselves wondering about it, my GM will ask me to roll for an Intelligence check to see if they might know anything about it. My character at that point will either fail his Intelligence check, and either not recall or remember ever coming across such a circle in their past. If they succeed at the Intelligence check, then the character will know they came across a circle of some kind. If they further decided to study the circle, the GM will ask me for an Arcana check. Probably more than one.

But my GM isn't going to come right out and say that the circle is a circle of imprisonment. Instead they'll let the party figure it out. If they don't figure it out, then they don't figure it out.

I'm going to push back against this a bit. Suppose you are playing a wizard whose master was a great conjurer. You'd know instantly what that circle is as you'd be intimately familiar with those sorts of things from your apprenticeship. I would not make you roll and would just tell you what it meant. Auto successes are often appropriate due to in-fiction circumstances.

It doesn't have to go to a roll.

 

[Cadence]

They are entirely trivial. No matter how you try to spin the statistics, you can't get around the fact that the fighter in all cases(except AC 0) will only hit 1 extra time every 20 swings on average, and in AD&D that means 20 rounds of fighting. 1 extra hit every 20 rounds is so trivial that it won't even matter in 99.9% of fights.

Fights that go 20+ rounds are extremely rare. Probably because they are boring as hell.

I mean, something that happens 5% of the time (like the extra hit you wouldn't have gotten) occurs in 5% of one round fights even, and results in at least one extra hit in just over 22% of 5 round fights. How often is taking out a mook important, and how often is a monster left there for the last round with just a few hit points left?

 

[Maxperson]

I mean, something that happens 5% of the time (like the extra hit you wouldn't have gotten) occurs in 5% of one round fights even, and results in at least one extra hit in just over 22% of 5 round fights. How often is taking out a mook important, and how often is a monster left there for the last round with just a few hit points left?

So if you need to roll exactly a 19, that's going to happen 22% of the time in a 5 round fight, with 1 swing per round? How many 5 round fights will it take to get to close to 100%.

 

[Cadence]

So if you need to roll exactly a 19, that's going to happen 22% of the time in a 5 round fight, with 1 swing per round?

The chance you don't roll exactly a 19 (or any other particular number) in 5 swings is (19/20)^5 which is about .7738. [because 19/20 numbers aren't the particular one you wanted]

So the chance of getting the exact number you want at least once from those five swings is 1-..7738 = .2262.

 

[Corinnguard]

I'm going to push back against this a bit. Suppose you are playing a wizard whose master was a great conjurer. You'd know instantly what that circle is as you'd be intimately familiar with those sorts of things from your apprenticeship. I would not make you roll and would just tell you what it meant. Auto successes are often appropriate due to in-fiction circumstances.

It doesn't have to go to a roll.

True. My Wizard character here would have been taught by his master about the nature of magic circles. So he would know a number of things about them, and thus be able to explain to the rest of his party about them. Hopefully without putting the rest of the party to sleep as he enthusiastically describes them at length.

 

[Maxperson]

The chance you don't roll exactly a 19 (or any other particular number) in 5 swings is (19/20)^5 which is about .7738. [because 19/20 numbers aren't the particular one you wanted]

So the chance of getting the exact number you want at least once from those five swings is 1-..7738 = .2262.

How many fights of 5 rounds would it take to get close to 100%?