General Discussion Thread X

[WarlockLord]

Back to the evil campaign, I'd do it. Abdul Alhazred is neutral, but isn't a shining beacon of morality.

PvP would be pretty cool, but I could see why people would hate it.

Maybe we should have a gladiator arena or something, with free true resurrections?

Just a thought.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I see the concern. Though, unless you can see something I can't, transferring funds would be very hit and miss (even with an acclomplice) because a character would have a 50% chance of winning at best and could just as easily worsen their situation. Hence the whole nature of the gamble.

Splitting traffic is kinda the aim, as it provides a welcome diversion from waiting in the inn, whilst still keeping the inn as the focal point of prospective adventures.

I would be interested in reading the comments in the other threads though. Could you please give me a link?

Let's assume my bank character has 20,000 Gold. And I want to take 100 more Gold from my main character who has an arbitrary amount. I'll give these characters names to make it easier. My main guy is Trechor the Rogue. My bank is Ivana Gold, the Cleric. And my accomplice is Cheetah the Katara Druid. He also has 20,000 Gold. I now have a 127/128 chance of transferring my gold. Why?

Step 1:
There is no house advantage, so I'll just have Trechor bet Cheetah 100 gold. Do I lose? Sweet! Cheetah takes the gold and can now get it to Ivana (go to Step 2). Do I win? Oh crap. Well now I have 100 more Gold and Cheetah lost 100. Poor guy. Oh well, I bet 200 (the 100 I want to transfer and the 100 I just won). Do I lose? Sweet! Cheetah takes the gold, keeps his 100 he lost and then has 100 to give to Ivana (go to Step 2). Repeat this ad nauseum, doubling every time until you can go to step 2.

Step 2:
The same thing backwards. Cheetah plays until he loses to Ivana, starting at 100 and doubling his bet each time. When he finally loses, she will have gained exactly 100 gold.

This scam works even better when both of the players want to transfer the same amount of gold to another of their own characters, as then they can just each skip phase one and go straight to losing to the bank character.

 

[Deus Ex Machina]

Doubling is a common method. However, whilst it works in theory, there are a few practical considerations:

*It assumes that players have a character with too much money, want to cheat, have multiple characters and that they have accomplices. Unlikely, but still possible.

*The money has to come from somewhere, so any way you look at it, you have to steal from Peter to give to Paul.

*Doubling assumes that you have an endless account. Many people come unstuck with this ‘technique’ because once you have a few losses in a row, it quickly adds up. After only 8x losses, your entire 20,000gp would be wiped-out and all you would be playing to win is 100gp.

*It also assumes that there are no witnesses. In reality, that would be very easy to spot and anyone who sees can ‘blow the whistle’ on the whole thing.

*If I was really keen on laundering money, I’d simply have Ivana Gold give a couple of accomplices (such as Cheetah) a few thousand each and engineer them bumping into Trechor. It would be easier and have no risk of loss.

*All potential 'money laundering' problems could easily be avoided by limiting or standardizing the amount that can be bet.

All said, I don't want to rock the boat and am not after increasing everyone’s workload in monitoring this thing. It’s just something that may be fun.

 

[Deus Ex Machina]

And while I'm postin'...

Back to the evil campaign, I'd do it. Abdul Alhazred is neutral, but isn't a shining beacon of morality.

PvP would be pretty cool, but I could see why people would hate it.

Maybe we should have a gladiator arena or something, with free true resurrections?

Just a thought.

I would also happily volunteer my current character (Valdaris) for a neutral/evil campaign if one was on, but I would not be too interested in using that character for PvP. Evil campaigns don't necessarily have to be PvP though. There's plenty of other NPCs out there to cause a nuissance.

On the subject of a PvP Arena, specifically...

I have already setup gladiator-style combat on another site I moderate and am very pleased with my efforts, to tell the truth.

Unfortunately, the other site is much (much, much, much) smaller than this one and the owner decided to have an argument with practically all the players involved about how they were all munchkins. They didn't like that too much and all left, which left me well and truly out in the cold. Rather (un)coincidentally, I decided to join up here, where I hope that my efforts would be a little more appreciated (or at least, not destroyed).

I don't want to bitch about it, but I raise the point that if anyone did want to do have an arena or anything along those lines, I have already done all the hard work and have a well-working system that could very easily be brought to this site, practically ready to go. In a nutshell, it is basically PvP miniatures combat using player’s character builds, with one division for SRD only and another with every book under the sun.

In fact, I would love to use all that material and not let it go to waste.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Yep, you could possibly lose all of Cheetah's money, hence the 127/128--128 is 2 to the 8th power I would posit that direct donations are much more closely monitored than seemingly random gambling would be, though. The doubling strategy is the same one that a player wanting to win might use, after all.

 

[Deus Ex Machina]

There are reasons why gambling is a very closely monitored industry. Still, limiting the bet amount to crush any money transfer schemes seems quite feasible.

The other thing is that there may be moral objections. Though I can’t see that being much of an issue in a fictional gaming world where polytheism, alcoholism, mass murder and even genocide are rife.

Anyhow, I’ve posted enough. And thanks, RA, for your comments. I’ll give others a bit of a chance to read the thread. Haha!

 

[SlagMortar]

I don't want to bitch about it, but I raise the point that if anyone did want to do have an arena or anything along those lines, I have already done all the hard work and have a well-working system that could very easily be brought to this site, practically ready to go. In a nutshell, it is basically PvP miniatures combat using player’s character builds, with one division for SRD only and another with every book under the sun.

This might be something to as the Enworld mods for another forum for. I enjoy an arena style battle once in awhile, and might even participate with some of my characters if they were better suited, but I wouldn't really want the characters to know about it and have to remember dying or killing some fellow adventurer.

On the gambling:
I think it would be fine if there was a betting limit. I'm not as concerned about the splitting of attention because the Red Dragon would be the place for adventures, which is different from the other tavern proposals in the past.

By the way, Ivana the Bank would have a hard time acquiring that 20,000 unless she was an active adventurer. In the long term, doubling strategies come out even (or lose when the house has an advantage). I haven't done the math, but I think you'd be very lucky if you were able to take starting gold and gamble it all the way up to 20,000 by doubling. Is it really that big a deal to be able to transfer 0.5% of a character's cash when there is nearly a 1% chance that the character you are trying to make richer loses everything?

 

[Phoenix8008]

I wouldn't worry too much about the gambling thing. It's already against the rules to transfer stuff from one character to another, so there is nothing new there. And while I haven't looked in detail, I doubt that there are many characters running around with thousands of unspent gold lining their pockets with nothing better to do.

As for the arena, the easiest way to deal with it is to make it all non-lethal. Worst that can happen is you get knocked out and wake up in a bed at the RDI. I assume that no XP would be gained from arena fighting? Unless of course, it opens up the possibility of a new job: Gladiator?

Or if we combine these two, then you can have gambling on the outcome of arena battles! Still shouldn't be too big a problem as long as it's all randomly generated via invisible castle and therefore random. But let the discussion continue...

 

[AGFlynn]

I can still run that you know... and if anyone had stayed around and listened instead of getting scared off.

Well, I'd certainly be interested. I once had a chaotic evil halfling axe murderer who was a lot of fun to play. The drawback is that you tend to spend a lot of time running away from the authorities and looking for places to hide.

 

[orsal]

Let's assume my bank character has 20,000 Gold. And I want to take 100 more Gold from my main character who has an arbitrary amount. I'll give these characters names to make it easier. My main guy is Trechor the Rogue. My bank is Ivana Gold, the Cleric. And my accomplice is Cheetah the Katara Druid. He also has 20,000 Gold. I now have a 127/128 chance of transferring my gold. Why?

If you've got another player's character as an accomplice, it's already possible to skirt a technicality to transfer money. Simply have Ivana make a sweetheart deal (sell something way below cost) with Cheetah, and then Cheetah do likewise with Trechor.

The safeguards: (1) it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention, and (2) the hope that Cheetah's player won't participate in a scam.

The scenario you describe is actually less worrisome than the existing possibility, because it involves gambling at fair odds. If you have a setup that will succeed in transferring money with probability 127/128, then in the situation where it fails, it backfires 127 times over. You've described a martingale -- and in the 1 time out of 128 when the person hoping to win 100 GP doesn't, he actually loses 12,700 GP out of the arrangement. In order to get probability 127/128, you've got to assume Cheetah has 12,700 GP to fritter away, and is willing to continue playing until he's lost it all in the hope of eventually winning one game. (Note: that's Cheetah, not Ivana, who needs that much spare cash. Ivana will only be down 100 GP -- once she loses that, she stops playing, so she doesn't need any more.) And Cheetah has to be prepared for the possibility of losing it all, with probability 1/128.

BTW, just to pick a nit: 128=2^7, not 2^8 as you say in another post.