Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Herremann the Wise]

Massive Damage assumes they lost those 199 hit points all at once (or at least in big chunks).

I thought that was what you were implying, not a heap of minor wounds and effort expended in reducing mortal blows to flesh wounds.

But Massive Damage also doesn't address the issue you described with 4E - that there are no grievous injuries except those that kill you. Because Massive Damage in 3E... kills you.

True. I was just inserting a qualification to make what I thought you were saying correct - that they would carry on as before provided that they saved against massive damage (if applicable).

So again in 3E, you're either dead, or you aren't suffering a grievous injury.

Not true. I think if you go from the positives down to about -7 to -9, the DM can start going to town with their gory/vivid descriptions without worrying too much about whether the rules are going to contradict the description. In such situations, death is probable without healing of a divine nature.

But if Cure Minor Wounds can fix a bolt in the eye, why is Regenerate a 7th level spell in 3E? If the DM has described a ruined organ, then the spell that fixes ruined organs should be required to fix it. If he wants the wound to be fixable by Cure Minor Wounds, he shouldn't describe a ruined organ...

Fair enough, although remove deafness/blindness would work equally as well as Regeneration - a capricious priest might suggest only the latter but any forthright cleric who knows their salt will know the 2nd level spell would serve equally. And again, you know how every so often in the papers you see someone who's suffered a nailgun accident with a nail through the eye socket that misses every major piece of artery, organ and brain [there was one here in Sydney about 4 years ago from memory - and a fence javelin through the underside of the jaw exiting through the eye socket before that], well take my bolt example and apply the same circumstances. Cure minor wounds would obviously assist - at least in terms of stabilizing. I wouldn't feel too bad though if the DM used such description and then said that the group would have to cough up a remove blindness/deafness spell on the morrow. I think that would be within the DM's license to do as such.

So yeah, I think 3E (at least how my group plays and interprets it) gives the DM a little more freedom in this regard to go to town with the guts on the floor - if such is your cup of tea.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[BryonD]

And this gets back to the point I was trying to make about what you are willing to sacrifice to make the game work? How far are you willing to go to make things function at the table?

And that gets back to the issue that you are forcing assumptions down other peoples' games that don't apply.

Different people can have widely different preferences and therefore the very concept of "function at the table" can vary wildly. You are strongly implicating that people who don't see it as you do simply are "inflexible" and unwilling to "go" "far" enough. But that is closed minded. It may be that people who disagree with you are willing to go even further. They just find a competely different direction to be more rewarding.

I'm perfectly content with the abstract nature of HP.
If someone presents an injury system that works, I'm interested in that as well.
The whole firearms quote above seems, if any, a deep discussion of the obvious. Of course a real shot to the head is deadly. So is being run through by a sword. Whichever way you go with it, there needs to be a consistency between the fucntion of the two.

 

[GlaziusF]

I question the conclusions of the study you cited.

Well, it's really several studies. You can pick a bone with whichever one you choose.

It starts with GA Miller's seminal presentation on the limits of human working memory, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two", originally published in the 1956 Psychological Review.

From there is the notional expansion of working memory capacity via chunking, as seen in Chase and Simon's study "Perception in Chess", issue 4, page 55, of Cognitive Psychology 1973

Most of Tversky's body of work develops the notion that humans judge probability by making mental sets. There's some good work in "[SIZE=-1]Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness", published in 2003, particularly Tversky and Kahneman's chapter, "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability". Tversky never got much professional recognition for his work with Kahneman, who received a Nobel Prize in Economics for explaining seemingly irrational economic decisions, 6 years after Tversky's death in 1996.

[/SIZE]But the research that most directly supports my statements on human judgments of probability is probably Hertwig et al's "Decisions From Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice", from the 2004 run of Psychological Science, volume 15, issue 8, pp 534-539. In brief, when people are confronted with the possibility of rare events they tend to overestimate their frequency when working from textual descriptions and, more practically, underestimate their frequency when working from real experience of them.

 

[cwhs01]

So yeah, I think 3E (at least how my group plays and interprets it) gives the DM a little more freedom in this regard to go to town with the guts on the floor - if such is your cup of tea.

Are you saying that 3.x is a good ruleset because you don't follow the rules? Fair enough, but i guess this could be true (in your case) for 4e as well

 

[Hussar]

And that gets back to the issue that you are forcing assumptions down other peoples' games that don't apply.

Different people can have widely different preferences and therefore the very concept of "function at the table" can vary wildly. You are strongly implicating that people who don't see it as you do simply are "inflexible" and unwilling to "go" "far" enough. But that is closed minded. It may be that people who disagree with you are willing to go even further. They just find a competely different direction to be more rewarding.

I'm perfectly content with the abstract nature of HP.
If someone presents an injury system that works, I'm interested in that as well.
The whole firearms quote above seems, if any, a deep discussion of the obvious. Of course a real shot to the head is deadly. So is being run through by a sword. Whichever way you go with it, there needs to be a consistency between the fucntion of the two.

I'm not sure where you're getting this from what I'm writing. Tone is difficult I guess. I'm most certainly not stating that one form is superior to the other. I'm saying that where each person draws the line will be different.

Any value judgement you derive from that statement is purely your own.

For myself, and I think a number of others, the line can be drawn further down the road than for others. Again, this is not saying I'm right and you're wrong. We're talking about what people enjoy, so, right and wrong don't really enter into it.

I thought I had defined "function at the table" the beginning of this thread.

Game First: The designer looks at how the game is being played at the table and creates mechanics to best facilitate that. Flavour is then added afterwards to justify the mechanics.​

Now, you are right that some groups will fall outside of this. However, function at the table simply means that the mechanics don't cause the game to come to a grinding halt.

What I find interesting is that there are very, very few actual mechanical issues being discussed here. Almost entirely it's flavour issues - how to connect hit points to wounds for example is a flavour issue. No one has come out and said, "Healing surges don't work" because they do work. Healing overnight does work, in the context of the game.

What people are complaining about is that something like healing overnight is too far down the road and past their individual cut off line for acceptable abstractions. Mechanically, it's fine. It works and doesn't cause any problems at the table. In fact it solves the problem of requiring a healer/cleric in the party.

But, like unrealistic reload times for firearms, it's something that people don't want to sacrifice for the game.

 

[Raven Crowking]

But the research that most directly supports my statements on human judgments of probability is probably Hertwig et al's "Decisions From Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice", from the 2004 run of Psychological Science, volume 15, issue 8, pp 543-539. In brief, when people are confronted with the possibility of rare events they tend to overestimate their frequency when working from textual descriptions and, more practically, underestimate their frequency when working from real experience of them.

Thanks for citing sources. I'd have to examine the setup of the experiment(s) as well as the data to know whether or not I would accept its conclusions at face value. As I am sure you know, not every experiment demonstrates what its creators believe it demonstrates. In many cases, the creators are choosing from a set of potential interpretations of the results, and in other cases they are making broad assumptions from narrow parameters where doing so does not necessarily make sense.

And, of course, sometimes they are good experiements whose conclusions are solid.

In this case, though, I would suggest that it is prossibly true that the test subjects didn't understand the variables, and were thus unable to predict the odds correctly, rather than being unable to understand the odds themselves.


RC

 

[Delta]

The research that Glazius is citing is pretty much rock-solid. People in general royally suck at handling probability.

But that doesn't mean that long odds shouldn't be part of a game. If anything, it argues more strongly that long odds should be part of a game, where people can play/ practice/ experience it in a "safe" limited context.

I'm a professor of probability & statistics and I feel that my entire intuition about probability (proven pretty solid over time) has come out of playing pen-and-paper D&D for about 30 years.

 

[Fenes]

It isn't that hard to judge probabilities. 1 in 20 swings is a 20. With 4 attacks, and 2 "full rounds" per fight, every 2 to 3 fights you'll roll a 20. If you use the 20+20=dead rule, then you've got a roughly 2% chance to land such a blow in a fight.

 

[GlaziusF]

But that doesn't mean that long odds shouldn't be part of a game. If anything, it argues more strongly that long odds should be part of a game, where people can play/ practice/ experience it in a "safe" limited context.

As far as that goes I agree. After all a game is intended to let you experience the same sort of struggle you might face in real life but with the consequences taken out.

However 4E is also intended to be more improv-friendly, explicitly giving tips to the DM based on tenets of improv theater (always say yes). In that case, having something that could derail your "performance" is worse if it happens at long odds, because in practical terms you're not even considering it could happen.

That's why I would argue that aggregate long odds are better than single-shot long odds, because at least as the aggregate wears on you can become slowly more aware of what's happening and maybe have something ready to go if it finally hits.

 

[Delta]

It isn't that hard to judge probabilities. 1 in 20 swings is a 20. With 4 attacks, and 2 "full rounds" per fight, every 2 to 3 fights you'll roll a 20. If you use the 20+20=dead rule, then you've got a roughly 2% chance to land such a blow in a fight.

Admitedly, the vast majority of the population cannot do what you just did. I expect D&D players would test much, much better at probability than the population-at-large.

Scene: I'm teaching a class. I finish a problem and come up with, say, 75%. I now know that I have to ask "Is that good bet or a bad bet?" Half the class says "Good bet!" Half the class says, "What, why is that? How can you tell?"

Teaching is nonstop amazing to me like that.