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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5064576" data-attributes="member: 82106">Meh, I've designed games. A certain handiness with numbers is a good thing, but honestly the best game designer I've ever known is a guy that is certainly VERY clever but wouldn't know a negative binomial distribution from a hole in the ground, though he could probably tell you how long an average encounter is going to last by scribbling on the back of an envelope for an hour. Its not MATH that gets you a good game design. Its a feel for how things will play combined with an ability to stack a bunch of numbers together in a creative way and come up with a system that is a combination of elegance and fun. 100 Phd mathematicians won't do you a bit of good in that. Nor is a negative binomial distribution really all that fancy. It amounts to saying "If I flip a coin 10 times, how many heads am I likely to come up with?". So yeah, given specific fixed assumptions or ranges of outcomes on say attack dice you can predict the length of an encounter, but it won't answer questions like how good is the encounter or what happens if the party uses unorthodox tactics or has a non-standard build.People are too enamored of the concept of math in games overall. Its obviously relevant and the math should support the goals of the game, but games aren't math and math isn't games unless you're doing math puzzles. An RPG shouldn't be a math puzzle and as people on this board have AMPLY demonstrated by disassembling the math of 4e its not all that hard to make that aspect of a game work. The trick is making a fun game that works. With something like 4e its doubly hard because it needs to be fun at levels 1-30. If you notice though, the 4e math is actually fairly minimal there as it basically just consists of keeping the ratio of attack and defense and damage vs hit points fairly linear throughout 30 levels while allowing the game to evolve in some meaningful sense.Honestly I think if you look at the SC system what you find is that it isn't the math that makes it hard for people to run SCs. Its managing to make the SC fit logically into the narrative of the game and not break into the immersion or seem illogical. The SC math is a headache but its not that complex. Where it gets ugly is when you toss lots of modifiers on die rolls and try to work out how they change things. Once you understand it, its pretty simple though. I don't think they failed in the math on SCs in a basic sense. All they failed to do was really explain them well enough. I think the designers just didn't know how to explain it. I can run them fine now after doing it a lot of times but I still can't explain what I do exactly.</blockquote>

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