Rule mechanic design help. I need opinions.

[RangerWickett]

I want a mechanic to handle people playing chess. The way I'm doing this is Knowledge (nobility and royalty) checks. Now, I have a couple ways of going about this. Combine one possibility each from (1, 2), (I, II), and (A, B). Which option do you think is best? Which option do you think would work for the greatest array of competitions (races, basketball games, battles of wits, etc.)?


1. Opposed checks. The winner gets a 'success.' Once one person has 8 successes more than his opponent, he wins.

2. Direct checks. Each round, the two players make checks against DC 10. If you succeed, you get a 'success,' and you still need 8 more than your opponent to win, but here a success implies "played competently," rather than "played better than opponent."


I. Lots of numbers. Each time you succeed, you just add it to your running tally of successes. This might result in a long match ending with you have 32 successes, and your opponent having 24.

II. 'The arm wrestling version.' This only works with the opposed checks option above. If you win, if your opponent has any successes, you instead reduce his successes by 1. Basically you see-saw around 0 successes, and in order to win you have to keep your opponent at 0 successes.


A. Simple. Each time you beat your opponent, you get one success.

B. Scaling. For every 10 points you beat your opponent by, you get an additional success. This lets the more skilled player win faster.

 

[RangerWickett]

The way I see it:

1IA - This is the simplest.
2IA - This works well for, say, basketball. After X number of rounds, you see who has the most successes, which would be equivalent to points scored. It works well for any sort of competition where you have a time limit, but not a target. For chess, or a race, there is a clear point where you win. For most sports, you keep playing as long as there's time, and there's always a possibility for a come-back.

1IIA - This is kinda odd, honestly. It requires a bit of funky math, but it appropriately represents "who's ahead, and by how much." If you look at a chess game many turns in, a layman would see who has the most pieces, and that would be a good indication of who was winning. He wouldn't care how long they'd been playing.
2IIA - Not available.

1IB, 2IB, 1IIB, 2IIB - These require extra calculation. They might be good for competitions where time is a factor, and they let a string of good dice rolls give you quite a lead. But if the competition has 5 or more rounds, probability is likely to balance out and let the person with the higher bonus win anyway. I feel the B option is just an unnecessary complication.



So, I think it comes down to 2I vs. 1II. They work for different sorts of contests. Overall, though, I think 2I is better, because it can handle multiple contestants. If you have 3 people running a race, opposed checks can be a pain in the ass.

Do you agree? Should I use this rule?

Each round, contestants roll against a given DC (usually 10)? Each contestant who beats the DC gets a 'success.' The contest ends either after a set number of rounds, or once a contestant has a sufficiently high margin of success.

The problem I can see would be, what if the DC is 10, and all the contestants have a +10 modifier. They'd always succeed. I don't want opposed checks, because it'd be a pain to handle multiple opponents. I might actually have to go with B as an option.

 

[RangerWickett]

Another possibility for chess:

Each player starts with 20 resource points, representing his pieces. Each round, each contestant makes a Knowledge (gaming) check with a bonus equal to his resource point total. For every multiple of 10 his result is, his opponent loses 1 resource point. Once your opponent has no resource points, he loses.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I want a mechanic to handle people playing chess. The way I'm doing this is Knowledge (nobility and royalty) checks. Now, I have a couple ways of going about this. Combine one possibility each from (1, 2), (I, II), and (A, B). Which option do you think is best? Which option do you think would work for the greatest array of competitions (races, basketball games, battles of wits, etc.)?


1. Opposed checks. The winner gets a 'success.' Once one person has 8 successes more than his opponent, he wins.

2. Direct checks. Each round, the two players make checks against DC 10. If you succeed, you get a 'success,' and you still need 8 more than your opponent to win, but here a success implies "played competently," rather than "played better than opponent."


I. Lots of numbers. Each time you succeed, you just add it to your running tally of successes. This might result in a long match ending with you have 32 successes, and your opponent having 24.

II. 'The arm wrestling version.' This only works with the opposed checks option above. If you win, if your opponent has any successes, you instead reduce his successes by 1. Basically you see-saw around 0 successes, and in order to win you have to keep your opponent at 0 successes.


A. Simple. Each time you beat your opponent, you get one success.

B. Scaling. For every 10 points you beat your opponent by, you get an additional success. This lets the more skilled player win faster.

I would choose (1, I). The reason I choose 1. is that chess is very definitely a game of opposed strategy, and knowledge of that strategy is key to victory. If your opponent knows a specific gambit, and you also know the gambit and a response to the gambit, you gain an advantage. Rolling against a static difficulty would not simulate this. However, I would change the victory conditions to require a specific number of successes, rather than 8 more than the opponent, for the same reasons I give in the next paragraph. But I might also keep the "8 more than the opponent" victory condition in addition to the specific success requirement, to simulate a clever player finding an early checkmate, which will happen more often with players who are poorly matched. To allow for stalemate, I'd consider a victory under a certain margin to be a stalemate. For example, if you need 30 points to win, if both players manage to reach 28 points without either party reaching victory conditions, consider it a stalemate.

The reason I choose I. is that in chess, unlike in some other games, the game is played ablatively. As the game progresses, each player loses pieces and has fewer and fewer options for manoeuvres. This makes it seem as though the game is counting down to zero on both sides, with each player reducing the other's score until the last one with points remaining is the winner. That can be simulated by reversing it, such that each player counts his own score up from zero to a certain total, with the other player attempting to stop him from doing so. Chess seems to me to operate as two players trying to tie each other up with a decreasing length of rope. At some point the knots will simply close on one player or the other as they progressively tighten. The trick is to direct those knots to close on your opponent instead of yourself. In any case, using the system I outline here the progression cannot be reversed, and the chess game cannot go on forever, which it could if you had the "arm-wrestling" style of contest.

edit: As for A & B...I'd just use "gain a number of points equal to the value by which you won the opposed check" and design the victory conditions with this in mind.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

How detailed a mechanic are we talking about?

In simple mode, opposed checks with 'best opponent by X successes' works good. Scalable by the difficulty of the game. Tic Tac Toe could take one success, Chess could take 8, Global Domination could take 20

Gee.. why dont you post the entire question at once ....

after reading your new post....

Each round, contestants roll against a given DC. Each contestant who beats the DC gets a 'success.' The contest ends either after a set number of rounds, or once a contestant has a sufficiently high margin of success.

Add, ' or once a contestant reaches the target number of successes'

Yes.. then each game would set the DC and the end state desired.
fx, High School chess match, DC 10, 8 success margin
Chess vs Blue Max, DC 25, 8 success margin
Foot Race, DC 15, first to 10 successes
Basketball, 5 rounds, .. hmmm.. random thought. DC = 10 + (avg(opponents bonus)/2)
Joe, skill +8 plays Fred, skill 3. DC = 15 (10 + (8+3/2) ??? no idea how much sense that makes.. but skill has an effect on the game..

Knowledge(tactics) and Knowledge(Psychology) providing synergy bonus?
Just had a talk at work concerning the psychology of game/compitetion....

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Damn RW.. you type too fast

Chess is probably the hardest to emulate with die rolls because, while deceptivly appearing to be a simple ablative {thanks for the term Dr Awkward} game, some resources have more importance than others. Risk is a pure ablative/resource game and could be done with a dwindling resource model. Chess can be won by the player with the least remaining resources.

I would like the model with higher skill results adding successes, but that is more time intensive.
What would be nice is a model similar to Penumbra's public debate rules, which are essentially combat rules. Each side gets HP, AC, BAB.. and then use tactics that may deal amounts of damage to thier foe. All the defensive/offensive tricks exist... with a lengthy listing of possible tactics and how they interact with each other.

The problem is, running a model of a chess game in this fashion would take about as long as simply playing it out on a chess board!

 

[Aus_Snow]

Eh, well. You did say that you need opinions. So.

If it's to be skill-based (which makes about as much sense as anything else, I guess), I believe something like Knowledge [strategy] would be more appropriate than Knowledge [nobility and royalty]. Partly because I can't see any good reason why those with little or no exposure to nobility and royalty couldn't learn to play chess, and even become masters of the game. Either way, an Akashic would sure make a killer player. Rightly so, though.

You could break it into an arbitrary number of 'phases', then at each phase give each character the option to make Int checks of DC x (to think x/5 phases ahead, say - but I'm not sure about the numbers here, at all). If they made it, some kind of proportional bonus could apply (to their Knowledge [strategy] checks). Hm. Actually, the more I think about it, the harder it becomes to sort anything out. I'll have to think this one over.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Opposed Roll. D20 + skill (Profession - Chess, INT); use aternatively = Profesison Gambler if you want it a more generally useful skill in your game.

AoW suggests profession gambler for DragonChess.

Mechanic

Opposed roll. To win, you must beat your opponent by more than five, (that is, 6 or higher on the opposed roll) else it is a stalemate.

A person who is untrained in the skill must win the opposed roll to beat a trained opponent by 10 + the opponent's skill level to win. A master chess player - with a skill rank of 10 cannot be beaten by an untrained opponent - ever. (Noobs don't win at chess very often - and never beat a master player, no matter how "lucky" they are).

One can underestimate an opponent or become distracted, but it is simply not a game of chance.

 

[jgbrowning]

Set a high DC. Roll both parties rolls at the same time. First one to succeed wins. In case of tie, roll again.

joe b.

 

[RangerWickett]

Okay, some folks are taking the simplistic approach, which is fine, but I feel that lacks drama. I know that a simplification of chess (which is already a game) won't be as complicated as a simplification of combat, but I want the mechanics for chess and similar non-combat competitions to allow for a little give and take.