The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[payn]

The problem is it has a lot of perverse incentives. Its intrinsically attractive to keep circling back around to cycles through services until you're just this side of taking aging hits--but in some of those services, you've thrown a few too many survival checks for probability to be kind to you, since that's, if I recall correctly, about 4-5 term cycles. It can be even more true if your luck on the tables were weird early on and you look like you're going to go into play with, well, no real function.

That too is something I find overstated. Folks often think they have to be really really good at a single skill. The game has a pretty flattened progression, but you still have ways to manage to improve. Having a diverse set of skills isnt bad either. They also think you need a ton of benefits rolls when you muster out. I get why folks think they need to maximize chargen, but its really not necessary. I have rolled hundreds of characters with folks and can count on one hand the amount of times I told them to toss and restart because the character was unplayable. As far as random chargen systems go, its pretty mild in making a bad character compared to say any edition of D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That too is something I find overstated. Folks often think they have to be really really good at a single skill.

I'm not talking about being good at a single skill. I saw character walk out with Saber-1, Vacc-Suit 1 and a boost to Endurance. The function that character was going to serve in a campaign was--?

Seriously, I'd find a decently arranged set of -1s and -0's more useful than a single skill at -3 in many cases.

The game has a pretty flattened progression, but you still have ways to manage to improve. Having a diverse set of skills isnt bad either. They also think you need a ton of benefits rolls when you muster out. I get why folks think they need to maximize chargen, but its really not necessary. I have rolled hundreds of characters with folks and can count on one hand the amount of times I told them to toss and restart because the character was unplayable. As far as random chargen systems go, its pretty mild in making a bad character compared to say any edition of D&D.

I'll tell you a truth; that's setting the bar pretty low. But I've made it clear I consider almost all random gen systems kind of a pestilence, at least if they're mandatory. Trying to hammer Mythrus's character gen into something that wasn't random but also wasn't breakpointy beyond belief was a massive struggle I took just not long ago. Admittedly, parts of that have more to do with not ending up with something simply not what you wanted than something bad, but it wasn't like Trav wasn't vulnerable to that, too (bad was usually a consequence of being forced out after one term, but if things landed wrong, two could do it, too.)

 

[payn]

I'm not talking about being good at a single skill. I saw character walk out with Saber-1, Vacc-Suit 1 and a boost to Endurance. The function that character was going to serve in a campaign was--?

I'm sure the basic training must have been forgotten here? Should have a number of 0 spills that. Though looks like a good candidate to be part of a ships vanguard to me.

I
Seriously, I'd find a decently arranged set of -1s and -0's more useful than a single skill at -3 in many cases.

Agreed.

I'll tell you a truth; that's setting the bar pretty low. But I've made it clear I consider almost all random gen systems kind of a pestilence, at least if they're mandatory. Trying to hammer Mythrus's character gen into something that wasn't random but also wasn't breakpointy beyond belief was a massive struggle I took just not long ago. Admittedly, parts of that have more to do with not ending up with something simply not what you wanted than something bad, but it wasn't like Trav wasn't vulnerable to that, too (bad was usually a consequence of being forced out after one term, but if things landed wrong, two could do it, too.)

I don't like random chargen much either but Traveller never bothered me.

 

[trappedslider]

 

[dragoner]

I'm not talking about being good at a single skill. I saw character walk out with Saber-1, Vacc-Suit 1 and a boost to Endurance. The function that character was going to serve in a campaign was--?

Seriously, I'd find a decently arranged set of -1s and -0's more useful than a single skill at -3 in many cases.



I'll tell you a truth; that's setting the bar pretty low. But I've made it clear I consider almost all random gen systems kind of a pestilence, at least if they're mandatory. Trying to hammer Mythrus's character gen into something that wasn't random but also wasn't breakpointy beyond belief was a massive struggle I took just not long ago. Admittedly, parts of that have more to do with not ending up with something simply not what you wanted than something bad, but it wasn't like Trav wasn't vulnerable to that, too (bad was usually a consequence of being forced out after one term, but if things landed wrong, two could do it, too.)

That is the thing I find is that point buy usually creates a median, between the two opposite ends of random, though I find I often build the same character over and over so maybe abandon that and give that character as a template.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Well it's a question about the 5E rules, and the thread is tagged with the yellow "D&D 5E" label, and the author quotes from the 5th Edition Player's Handbook. So by all means: tell us about that older edition. Again. For the 200th time.

Well, I'll just mention that, in the holy words of EGG, in the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide, the Most Perfect Set of Rules Ever Devised, it says:

“It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule books upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game. As you hew the line with respect to conformity to major systems and uniformity of play in general, also be certain the game is mastered by you and not by your players. Within the broad parameters given in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons volumes, you are creator and final arbiter. By ordering things as they should be, the game as a whole first, you campaign next and your participants thereafter, you will be playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as it was meant to be.”

 

[RealAlHazred]

As a big Traveller fan, the fear of dying in chargen is overstated. In my experience, a player has to make some pretty poor decisions and go on a bad run of luck with the dice for it to happen. Usually, its a combo.

I once had a player who wanted to play a scientist from the Imperial Academy of Science (JTAS#22? I forget), but he failed the roll to find a branch on his home planet, so per the rules there wasn't one. So he made a Scout, since that was close, and puttered away a few terms; the way we roleplayed his career, he was a certified pain in the ass for his superiors and got another Scout fired. He got wounded and mustered out early, and ended up with a Low Passage. He asked if there was a branch of the IAS on any nearby worlds, and the rolls indicated there was, so he decided to use his Low Passage to get there. He boarded and went into cold sleep, and then failed his survival roll. I told him, just before the ship took off, the medical officer couldn't be located, so a new guy came on instead, a guy with the bearing of an ex-Scout service member...

In any case, it was the hardest I've ever seen a Traveller player work to die in character generation...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The really interesting AI threads are the ones we'll never see, when people discover, one industry at a time, that yes, it can be used in their industry and no, it won't just be a tool for them to use in their jobs -- some of them, maybe many of them, are going to be losing their jobs.

I'm old enough to remember when travel agents were an incredibly common job and seeing travel agents on the TV news scoffing at travel websites, since automation "could never" replace the value add of having an actual human talk to a customer and help them fine tune their travel plans. Today, there's only a handful of travel agents, typically working either with the super-rich or the super-old.

Nearly every industry has repetitive functions that an AI can do, if not now, within the next 10 years. And the "learn to code" jobs will be among the first to be impacted, as low level coding work tends to be fairly simple and homogenous, as well as paid highly enough to make even a relatively expensive AI a good financial trade-off.

"Learn to code" is going to be replaced with "go to nursing school" or "become an elementary school teacher," because there are going to be a lot fewer jobs involving sitting at a desk, typing stuff into a computer. The computers aren't going to need most of us to do that, even if, like the travel agents, we bring a human touch to the proceedings that we're sure has value.

There will be schadenfreude when we see movie industry executives that are largely paid to pick and manage projects, but who don't provide anything that a good statistical analysis tool couldn't do better, more accurately and cheaper, losing their jobs as well. But a lot of us will be chuckling while we're signing up for job retraining ourselves.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm sure the basic training must have been forgotten here? Should have a number of 0 spills that. Though looks like a good candidate to be part of a ships vanguard to me.

As I recall, that was a Marine, so what else they got wasn't much better. Probably a gun-1 or -0 of some sort. And the point was that he wasn't necessarily going to look any better than one of the other characters who had gone an extra term or two and had other skills to boot. So there was always that passive pressure to stay in for about four terms if you could. And that upped the risk of the survival roll having failed you out somewhere along the line non-trivially.

Agreed.

It was just hard to ensure you'd get that. After all, while you chose the table, it was still a random roll, and if you didn't have an above average Education, one table (with some of the more consistently useful skills) was unavailable.

I don't like random chargen much either but Traveller never bothered me.

Honestly, I thought it was worse than D&D in some ways in that regard (because I was comparing it to OD&D while everything had so little choice in many ways in character gen, there was less of it you were rolling and it meant less). They were both games of their time, of course, so its not entirely fair to object that they didn't have less random generation when almost everything did. I'm far less tolerant of modern takes on it that stick to that (since I otherwise think there's still some sound design there--I've use d one or another version of their animal encounters tables to get the basics for other SF games for example).

 

[Thomas Shey]

That is the thing I find is that point buy usually creates a median, between the two opposite ends of random, though I find I often build the same character over and over so maybe abandon that and give that character as a template.

Well, my feeling on that is "If you're constantly building the same character, that's probably revealed preference on what you like. Barring really pathological examples (trying to shoehorn concepts into campaigns where they really don't fit), its not the system or the GM's job to force you not to do that. And if you don't like it as a player--that's easily fixed if you're serious about it."

(This is assuming the system isn't stupidly biased toward some very specific constructions for certain purposes--but even in those, I don't see a virtue in having some people be able to get there because they're dice were cooperative and others not).