- Location
- The Underdark
Rak asked to roll on a smaller die because she wanted loretechs rather than high end stuff.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
High end techs tend to be expensive (resources/dice/STUs) projects, and we already have a lot on our plates. Rolling something like modern Nod stealth would be a mixed blessing when we aren't able to afford to deploy our current Nod modern lasers.
I've always been the kind of person who likes to build card decks with low-cost and weak, but weird and esoteric, abilities. The deciding factor though, was that the lore is at the lower end of the table. That said, I'm really happy with this roll, as tib techs are my second favorite tech type.
I've always been the kind of person who likes to build card decks with low-cost and weak, but weird and esoteric, abilities. The deciding factor though, was that the lore is at the lower end of the table. That said, I'm really happy with this roll, as tib techs are my second favorite tech type.
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- Location
- USA
Oh yeah. Getting more tiberium info is always a win.
I'm really looking forward to the war ending and getting our political points back up so we can research the couple of tib techs that have a political cost.
Really want to see where they lead.
I'm really looking forward to the war ending and getting our political points back up so we can research the couple of tib techs that have a political cost.
Really want to see where they lead.
- Location
- USA
Looking at the battle results I'm thinking that knocking out both phases of plasma missiles really helped us beat Krukov quite badly.
As I recall the missiles were specifically made to give the airforce more punch against his new flying fortresses.
Excellent timing.
As I recall the missiles were specifically made to give the airforce more punch against his new flying fortresses.
Excellent timing.
- Location
- The Underdark
Plasma missiles had roughly zero effect on the battles this quarter. What did start to have an effect was the Apollo wingmen.
Because they're getting to the Frontline in numbers at this point correct? I assume that even if we complete a phase in production it doesn't kick in until the next quarter right?
This is why I am so profoundly unfond of dice mechanics. It weakens narrative by subordinating it to chance.
- Location
- USA
That's why we have modifiers I guess.
Chance will always play a roll but we can try and give ourselves as many advantages as we can to give us the best chance possible.
Chance will always play a roll but we can try and give ourselves as many advantages as we can to give us the best chance possible.
We lost a raw roll against Krukov this turn in fact, but because our hidden modifier was larger the battle ended up a GDI win. Luck's not totally eliminated as a factor but we did enough to win despite the dice, if the dice had their way Krukov would be winning at least somewhere.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
On the other hand, war is vast, antinomian, and in many cases incomprehensible until someone sits down and sorts it all out in hindsight. It is not a purely deterministic machine, and never plays out entirely in accordance with the precepts of a single person's will.
Thus, arguably, the most realistic fictional depictions of war possible are those in which much of what takes place is essentially random, or a combination of predictable factors and randomness.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Around Jupiter 🪐
- Location
- New England
No dice takes all the fun out of it. Imagine the profound boredom of knowing ahead of time how a brand new story you've never read will play out!
It'd be like watching a "prequel". Ugh.
Decim
On again, off again lurker.
- Location
- St. Louis, MO
As frustrating as dice swings can be, having a fully deterministic combat system for war is actually less realistic. Things happen, and its up to the commanders to adapt to uncertain and unchanging circumstances. Chance has been noted to be key parts of war games dating back to the 1850s in Prussia, so its not like its a new idea.
Modifiers are useful, but a 30 will almost always lose to a 70.
Unless I am mistaken, the dice are the primary factor; the modifiers only matter if you're close. And since this game operates on a d100 rather than a d20, the odds of being close are not that great.
We lost the raw roll by three points.
We won our rolls against Krukov by more than ten and more than seventy. Even if Krukov was much stronger than us, we would still have won the seventy roll.
The dice generally do have their way, because 94 beats 20.
Chance is one element in war, certainly. No single person can shape everything according to a Brilliant Plan.
Goliath tends to beat David. America's war with Imperial Japan was brutally deterministic, because we had ten times as much industry as we did. Entertaining as it is to read about "the Miracle at Midway", no amount of bad luck was going to do more than alter the details of their defeat.
This isn't to say that Krukov shouldn't take Helsinki. Maybe he has the forces to succeed, I don't know. But it is frustrating to have success or failure rest on a random number generator.
Putting aside realism, it is narratively unsatisfying. Our failures at sea should come entirely from our lack of a proper navy, not the roll of a dice. Our triumph against Mehretu should come from our decision to offer an open hand to the Caravanserai, not chance. Randomness takes away some of the significance of our decisions, and it is those decisions that make for a satisfying narrative.
I don't understand.
Without dice, the QM would just allow our decisions to shape the story. They wouldn't know about our decisions ahead of time, just as we wouldn't know the consequences of our decisions.
Dice are profoundly frustrating, because in some games a nat 1 can make your best decisions turn out horribly, while a nat 20 can make the worst decisions produce excellent results. This game does a good job of handling the dice, with strong explanations for each outcome that don't reference random numbers. But the presence of random numbers makes everything worse.
You can argue that there's some element of realism in random chance; the best plan can be spoiled by ill luck, while terrible schemes can triumph through fortune. However, that's not very narratively satisfying. "The heroes won through random chance" is just as unpleasant as "the heroes lost through random chance".
A great deal of fiction is extremely unrealistic, but I prefer Holmes and Poirot to police procedurals. I think Raiders of the Lost Ark is a better story than "responsible archeologists spend twelve hours a day examining shards of pottery". Stories about teachers or doctors tend to emphasize the exciting bits, not the long hours of preparation and practice that go into doing your job correctly.
Things do happen, but if the dice are the primary factor then they can overwhelm your ability. All of your planning and preparation is less significant than the fact that you rolled a 9 and they rolled a 72.
One reason I like the Regency War so much is that I am not good at the mechanics of the "peacetime" planquest. Having large narrative-heavy posts is extremely engaging, and it helps me see the actual results of all our decisions. Which the "regular" quest does as well, but the Regency War is particularly heavy on fluff.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A Nat 1 for Nod gave us ORSCT boarding an airship. Thus all your arguments are invalid.
I confess my defeat and beg the Space Pirates for mercy that I do not deserve.
- Location
- New England
I'm going to jump off the wagon after this post, but my guess is that you're not a big Dungeons & Dragons guy. Not trying to dunk on you, but the central conceit of the "grandfather of RPGs" is the baked-in possibility of failure for every critical action - if you don't enjoy that, then there's not much else for you to enjoy in there, because without the dice it stops being a game and becomes an exercise in "five dudes sitting around somebody's parents' basement eating pizza and talking about setting goblins on fire" [adult edit: this is obviously an outdated stereotype - I'm the parent now and it's my basement]. Which is fine, I guess, but also kind of boring.
From my perspective, what makes a narrative exciting is the possibility of failure even after extensive planning. A story where every protagonist action succeeds is boring to me, even if I don't know which actions the protagonist will take. The player decisions *do* shape the story, they just don't shape it in the way the players intend. The dice are there to simulate the presence of other factors in the game that aren't player decisions, and also the effectiveness of player decisions - nobody says "I'm going to half-ass stabbing this goblin with my sword", but sometimes you roll a 1 and that means that you've got a sweaty hand and the goblin bites your kneecap and you drop the sword.
Interesting. I don't want to continue the derail for much longer, but I take the exact opposite approach. RPGs are roleplaying games, an exercise in character immersion and shared storytelling. The dungeon crawl is certainly part of that tradition, but RPGs are more than one particular subset of games.
Plans are based on incomplete information and shaped by personal bias. You don't need dice to create failure; make plans that exploit character flaws, or simply show them that they didn't know everything. The enemy gets a vote, too.
I do run a Dungeons & Dragons group at the library, and the children want to roll dice, so we roll dice. But I don't kill players based on a piece of plastic, and they don't win based on a nat 20. Failure or triumph rests on their decisions, which come from their virtues and their flaws and their choices. Not the random number generator.
I have been consistently impressed by the QM's ability to take random results and write them into the narrative. I'm pretty sure that if Krukov did take Helsinki, the QM could properly justify it through a combination of our errors and Krukov's proper use of his substantial industrial might. Just as he can justify Krukov's lack of success through a combination of his errors, our good decisons, and perhaps Krukov's desire to preserve his forces rather than risking them in an all-out offensive. But the QM's good writing doesn't mean that I like the system, just as Matt Mercer's skill doesn't mean that I think Dungeons & Dragons is the best way to run a roleplaying game.
Without the element of chance we wouldn't have Erewhon lol.
Checkmate, dice haters.
Personally, I think the dice rolls are useful for this purpose. It gives a framework for the QM to work off of instead of the QM having to decide entirely for themselves what they want to happen. Which means when bad things happen, it's mostly because of the dice rolls, not because the QM decided for whatever reason that bad thing needed to happen right then. 
It also means that we can get crazy unexpected results because of things like that Nat 1 example.
By the same token, it does skew our perspectives on certain characters because the dice gods hate them. I mean, Gideon was the top tier warlord in North America. One of the top 6-8 warlords on the planet. And yet we tend to consider him a bit of a joke because he consistently rolled poorly the first decade of this quest. If his rolls had been better, Chicago might not still exist, or would be in a much worse state. Krukov I don't hold too high an opinion of because he's trying to use Nod to out GDI the GDI on the battlefield, and the dice rolls means he generally ended up losing those attempts, which narratively can be seen as him playing into GDI's strengths like an idiot. OTOH, there is he who is blessed by the dice gods, motherfucking Stahl.
I do find it amusing that the guy I consider the biggest Nod threat because he knows how to Nod... is the guy that appears to be blessed by the dice gods. Perfect synergy between narrative and RNG there, somehow.
That being said, I do think that fudging the rolls/results as needed to keep things engaging and fun is generally acceptable.
--
As an aside, the "Miracle at Midway" is a bit of bunk, if we're speaking of "dive bombers arriving over the fleet as the Japanese strikes were ready to start taking off to attack the American carriers."
It also means that we can get crazy unexpected results because of things like that Nat 1 example.By the same token, it does skew our perspectives on certain characters because the dice gods hate them. I mean, Gideon was the top tier warlord in North America. One of the top 6-8 warlords on the planet. And yet we tend to consider him a bit of a joke because he consistently rolled poorly the first decade of this quest. If his rolls had been better, Chicago might not still exist, or would be in a much worse state. Krukov I don't hold too high an opinion of because he's trying to use Nod to out GDI the GDI on the battlefield, and the dice rolls means he generally ended up losing those attempts, which narratively can be seen as him playing into GDI's strengths like an idiot. OTOH, there is he who is blessed by the dice gods, motherfucking Stahl.
I do find it amusing that the guy I consider the biggest Nod threat because he knows how to Nod... is the guy that appears to be blessed by the dice gods. Perfect synergy between narrative and RNG there, somehow.
That being said, I do think that fudging the rolls/results as needed to keep things engaging and fun is generally acceptable.
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As an aside, the "Miracle at Midway" is a bit of bunk, if we're speaking of "dive bombers arriving over the fleet as the Japanese strikes were ready to start taking off to attack the American carriers."
See, for a long time there were only really three Japanese sources regarding Midway (Adm Nagumo's after action log (captured on Saipan in 1944), post-war interviews with naval officers by the USSBS, and Fuchida's book Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan) translated into English, and one of them has been overturned in Japanese Mil History circles for 20+ (probably more like 30-40+ at this point) years (Western Mil History circles started becoming aware of this fact in the early 2000s). Much of the whole Miracle at Midway is based on that particular source, unfortunately.
But basically, at a minimum Akagi was doing landing/takeoff operations of some sort or the other from 0837 to 1010, and there was no way they'd warm up and spot a strike in 15mins between the CAP recovery at 1010 and the "fateful five minutes" (also, Akagi launched CAP planes at 1025). Kaga and Soryu sent CAP up at 1000, Hiryu at 1013, and Soryu again at 1015. Based on Hiryu not launching a strike until 1050, the strike was more like 25-30mins from launching. Plus sporadic air attacks from Midway or the carriers (the torpedo squadrons) all morning meant that the IJN carriers didn't have an opening prior to that time frame to spot a strike between CAP operations, much less potentially launch it before the Midway strike returned and needed to land. The only planes on the flight decks when the dive bombers arrived were Zeros for CAP or were getting diverted from strike escort to CAP.
But basically, at a minimum Akagi was doing landing/takeoff operations of some sort or the other from 0837 to 1010, and there was no way they'd warm up and spot a strike in 15mins between the CAP recovery at 1010 and the "fateful five minutes" (also, Akagi launched CAP planes at 1025). Kaga and Soryu sent CAP up at 1000, Hiryu at 1013, and Soryu again at 1015. Based on Hiryu not launching a strike until 1050, the strike was more like 25-30mins from launching. Plus sporadic air attacks from Midway or the carriers (the torpedo squadrons) all morning meant that the IJN carriers didn't have an opening prior to that time frame to spot a strike between CAP operations, much less potentially launch it before the Midway strike returned and needed to land. The only planes on the flight decks when the dive bombers arrived were Zeros for CAP or were getting diverted from strike escort to CAP.
The bit you seem to be missing is that we provide the pre-existing conditions: what equipment the military has, the support, etc. The dice rolls determine what the military does with them. And please remember, we are not the military. We are the Treasury. In an RPG sense, the military is made up of NPCs, and the rolls are determining their actions. How good the rolls are, represents how well they act compared to their opponents.
Our planning sets the stage, but we do not control the actors.
With a dice-based system, Gideon could roll 100 96 82 76 95 93. Stahl could roll 5 11 24 16 33 7. A Nod warlord with an established record of bad decisions and horribly damaged forces could suddenly score six consecutive victories, while the reincarnated Legendary Insurgent could throw six fights in a row. Good writing can justify and explain this in-universe, but it's still a deeply flawed system.
I have no objection to the military being run by NPCs. I simply think that random number generation is a terrible way to determine NPC actions and success. The author has done a good job with Gideon, having his successful roll represent a daring surprise attack on a logistics center. That's the kind of thing that could succeed based on a lot of factors, many of which involve blind luck.
Under a dice system, we could roll 100 98 94. Or 1 3 6. With the first set of rolls, GDI's forces win an overwhelming victory. With the second, we suffer a hideous defeat. Our choices did not change. The characters involved did not change. The pre-existing conditions we shaped and the NPC characters the author created have been distorted to bow before the dictates of a small piece of plastic.
Imagine this in a novel. "Well, rolled a couple of nat 1s, so forget about the main character's arc. He was killed by a random group of bandits on his way to confront his former best friend."
"Darth Vader? I had plans for him, but it turns out that rebel commando group produced a lot of nat 20s. Looks like Luke will never get to meet his father!"
Dice aren't more realistic than narrative logic, either. "I know the Italian Army has some problems, but the dice love them. They can't roll anything below a 90, so it looks like the North African Campaign will be a glorious success."
Of course, a sufficiently skilled GM or QM can work around this. They can create a narrative despite the distortions created by the dice. Timur Garayev played chess blindfolded while riding an exercise bike, but that doesn't mean that blindfolds and exercise bikes are valuable for chess players.
- Location
- The Underdark
So a big part of the reason for me using the 100s is that the actual simulation is relatively thin. I don't have a big map with the location of every GDI battalion and brotherhood battalion equivalent down to the grid square. I don't have names for every general on every front, I don't have really their skill levels or condition of their troops. So I put that into dice rolls. It is a way to represent the chance that a well supplied elite unit of the brotherhood runs into a weaksauce gdi unit.
Now I could certainly go much more into simulation, but that would take between ten and twenty people to manage.
Edit: your investments do actually make a difference here because it changes what scales they can operate at. Gideon rolling a big victory means more along the lines of daring raid because you have invested enough to make conventional victory effectively impossible. Stahl losing big comparatively will tend to either be material losses or simply smaller. Or a subordinate acting out.
Now I could certainly go much more into simulation, but that would take between ten and twenty people to manage.
Edit: your investments do actually make a difference here because it changes what scales they can operate at. Gideon rolling a big victory means more along the lines of daring raid because you have invested enough to make conventional victory effectively impossible. Stahl losing big comparatively will tend to either be material losses or simply smaller. Or a subordinate acting out.
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