- Location
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A dice trick is what we've been calling any of the 'Reroll X's' or 'For every 3 dice, roll 1 more die'.
General Exalted Thread
A dice trick is what we've been calling any of the 'Reroll X's' or 'For every 3 dice, roll 1 more die'.
Jon Chung
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These are considered annoying because:
a) they obfuscate the probability curve to casual inspection but not to a determined player who is half decent with statistics and has access to a computer, which is less than useful.
b) they take meaningful time to resolve because they interact with the physical dice roll, which pushes back 'I get the result of my action so we can move on and resolve the next bit' behind 'yet more fucking around with dice'.
Some people like them because:
a) they are bad at estimating probability / do not do this anyway, and consider the loss of ability to make snap judgements about likelihood of success vs resources expended if you don't pre-calculate with a dice sim to be a non-problem
b) for some strange arcane reason they like the act of fucking around with dice more than the act of making interesting tactical decisions with the results thereof.
a) they obfuscate the probability curve to casual inspection but not to a determined player who is half decent with statistics and has access to a computer, which is less than useful.
b) they take meaningful time to resolve because they interact with the physical dice roll, which pushes back 'I get the result of my action so we can move on and resolve the next bit' behind 'yet more fucking around with dice'.
Some people like them because:
a) they are bad at estimating probability / do not do this anyway, and consider the loss of ability to make snap judgements about likelihood of success vs resources expended if you don't pre-calculate with a dice sim to be a non-problem
b) for some strange arcane reason they like the act of fucking around with dice more than the act of making interesting tactical decisions with the results thereof.
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- Location
- Ottawa
I don't think it's particularly strange or arcane to like messing around with dice. If the thread I started on the topic over on the official forums in any indication, it's common. At least among people who like Ex3.
Jon Chung
=][=
My view there is, the dice are there to inject a random element into combat resolution so that we do not have purely deterministic outcomes. Rolling dice in itself adds no value whatsoever to this, since what we're actually interested in is the PRNG result from the diceroll: if we could use a faster randomizer with the same distribution (a simulated diceroll via bot, for example), we should, because all actions in queue must be resolved sequentially by the GM and the involved player, there is only one GM doing resolution and any time spent resolving must therefore be weighed vs time wasted by everyone else waiting for resolution.
So, given that the slowest part of the process from start (determine that dice must be rolled) to end (get the end result of the roll so we may move on) is the physical act of rolling dice and counting results, any mechanic that requires us to go back and do more of that is pretty counterproductive: we are spending even more time messing with dice while the rest of the table waits on hold.
I want my results fast, so I can think about what I want to do next while the GM is processing the next thing in line. Alternatively, I want to give the player their results fast, so they can worry about that while I process the next thing in line. The interesting thing here should be "Given what just happened, what do I do next?" not "omg watch dat randomizer randomize!".
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- Location
- Virginia
I also think dice tricks are kind of dumb and I'm the sort of person who does not care about the dice themselves just the probabilities, but there is an interesting point in a Holden post in that thread: the dice tricks let them modulate the effective dice cap on a per-ability basis (necessary because different systems can handle different between-character disparities without breaking down). Of course you could also just do that explicitly but it would probably seem really weird and inelegant to a lot of players.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
But you could just... tune the systems to break down at the appropriate number of dice instead.
Jon Chung
=][=
If for some reason this is actually desired or needed (why are you balancing Ability A around a dicepool of X and Ability B around a dicepool of effective X+Y?), an easy way to do this would be to cut the idea of excellencies / generic dice-adders and give each ability its own custom dice-adding charm with its own cap, like how Exalted 1E gave Melee Excellent Strike, but Brawl didn't have a dice-adder.
This would serve the purpose you want, and waste vastly less time.
- Location
- Ottawa
Eh. If some people like screwing around with dice, I'm willing to spend a little extra time rolling to accommodate them.
Anyway, I already asked this on the official forums, but getting more answers can only help so...
Anyway, I already asked this on the official forums, but getting more answers can only help so...
I said:
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I agree wholeheartedly with this but I should put out that there are, in fact, people who like to watch that radomizer randomize.
I mean, Vegas basically exists because of them.
Romantic_Kaiju
Romantic Kaiju
- Location
- National Battlefield
Nah, Vegas exits cause people don't get that the house is a Cheating Cheater that Cheats.
Also, Did Onyx Path create a new wiki (like the awesome one that had all the homebrew and a brief explanation of every canon charm) for 3e?
Jon Chung
=][=
Sure, but do the other three or four people at the table deserve to have their time wasted by the one guy who's action I'm resolving watching his randomizer randomize? If he really wants to do that because that's his highest source of fun, he can do that without delaying the entire group by hitting a pub and playing the poker machines.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Jon you're doing that thing where you are extrapolating your preferences to everyone else. It's possible the entire group like playing Exalted Pachinko.
- Location
- Virginia
Actually, you can't. Ultimately this is a symptom of the fact that Exalted uses the exact same resolution mechanism with exactly the same parameters for every single task, whether it is "hit person with sword once" or "apply medical treatment to 100 refuges". By default, someone with maximum skill is rolling 11 dice, or 21 with a full Solar excellency.
Without dice tricks you have exactly one parameter you can vary to get the system to spit out the right probabilities: the difficulty.
The problem is, you only have one variable, but you have 10+ simultaneous equations, and it is not possible to solve a system of more equations than variables! You are gonna have a lot of probabilities miscalibrated.
This becomes particularly obvious with opposed systems, most notably combat. There need to be limits on the actual range of effective offensive dice and defenses. We want characters with at least a reasonable combat investment to be able to hit and able to defend a reasonable fraction of the time, even against powerful opponents. We want this for two reasons: first, since combat is an aggregate of many rolls, it will magnify a small advantage on individual rolls to still give high odds of final victory to the person with that advantage. Second, because "eh, there is no point attacking because you have basically no chance of hitting" is super not fun.
By contrast, if a contest between two characters usually involves just one roll then it needs to give a large per-roll advantage to the character with more investment. For example, with Stealth vs. Awareness if one character has invested in Stealth charms and the other has not invested in Awareness charms, the Stealth character should have a really good chance to beat the other guy's roll so he can sneak past.
The way you solve the problem (one variable, many equations) is to add more variables. The idiomatic way of doing that in Exalted is to add charms; competence in an area of skill is not just your ability dots but also how many charms you have bought. Some of those charms will be math-boosters, and those ones can't be standardized between abilities, because as above different abilities need to scale differently with degree of investment.
They could have achieved the same thing without dice tricks and just standard dice-adders, with the amount of dice-adding you can buy in an ability varying between abilities. I suspect they thought this would seem really weird and inelegant. "Why is the Melee dice cap 4 but the Medicine dice cap 10?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As I said, I don't like dice tricks, I would in fact be fine playing an RPG that used a spreadsheet RNG with no dice and algebraic formulas for probabilities that were displayed to four decimal places. But I'm a weirdo and normal people seem to enjoy rerolling stuff.
That's what I said, dude. Literally right there in the comment that you quoted.
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Circumstantial Penalties still exist, and are typically imposed by considerably elaborate actions. A -1 External is mathematically identical to a +1 Difficulty, which is also identical to requiring +1 threshold success past the roll. So a Difficulty 1 roll with a -2 External penalty requiring 3 successes past the Difficulty to pull off is exactly the same as rolling against a Difficulty 6. There's a lot of play here, since not everything is a snap-reflexive roll at maximum dice.
If you want to "tune" a single-ability system correctly by the math, then it falls to the actions which must be undertaken by the players to achieve that by establishing the minimum threshold of dice you require before your Charm bonuses become Bonuses and not offsetting the attempt to try these things unprepared. Not the ideal of some unpenalized "all your dice" super-roll made within a vacuum of context.
- Location
- Virginia
This does not actually give you more parameters to play with, since those penalties are (generally) a function of circumstance, not a function of your existing dice pool.
Slightly more formally, let D be the difficulty (or effective difficulty after accounting for penalties) and let pN be the desired probability of a character with a dice pool of N succeeding at the task. The simultaneous equations are:
Pr[1 die rolls D+ sux] = p1
Pr[2 dice roll D+ sux] = p2
...
Pr[11 dice roll D+ sux] = p11
(And this goes up to p21 if you want to consider excellency use, but whatever.)
There is no D that solves all of these equations unless your desires pNs just happen to fall on a particular probability curve.
Exalted actually kind of gives up on this point because it's basically unfixable. Instead it mostly concerns itself with the probability tables for people with maximized dice pools, and makes the real gradation of skill be "how many charms have you purchased". Since each charm has a customized power level, you can simultaneously set:
Pr[Character with Charm A succeeds at task] = pA
Pr[Character with Charms A and B succeeds at task] = pAB
Pr[Character with Charms A, B, and C succeeds at task] = pABC
and so on.
This is in fact what they have done. The combat charmsets produce substantially less variation in attack rolls than, for example, the Medicine or Craft charmsets produce in their respective rolls.
Jon Chung
=][=
Sure. However, my bias aside, the system shouldn't be designed around the assumption that watching the randomizer is an inherently pleasurable activity that will engross the whole group and hold their full attention through however many rounds of combat. That's got costs that the opposite assumption doesn't have, heh.
My point is directed at the dev team's reasoning, not you.
a) Differing dicecaps per ability via non-standardized dice/success adders is not unnatural and was done before in 1E. 3E apparently likes to disavow 2E and call back to 1E, so this fits fine.
b) If the design really values differing dicecaps per ability for whatever reason, doing it the 1E way is vastly more effective than filling each ability with non-standardized dice tricks to approximate the effect of having non-standardized dice adders, as dice tricks incur costs that non-standard dice adders do not.
c) Therefore, "we need to have different effective dicecaps per ability" is not a good defense of dice tricks. They should not have tried that.
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- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
My opinion here is that for me at least, there's only so much complexity and granularity that a system can try to cram down my throat before I either start forgetting chunks of them in the heat of the game, or just go "oh, fuck this" and jettison the fiddlier/more granular bits until the amount of shenanigans per turn has been pared down to the point where my players are actually enjoying themselves instead of having to stop the fight to go consult the rulebook again so they know the precise whosafudge of the lagrangian whatsit that the game system demands they calculate before they're allowed to try and have their character actually do something.
If I tried to institute the kind of insanity 3E is trying to operate on, my players would walk inside of an hour. Holden & co. are perfectly within their rights to sell such a system, but I'm also permitted to object to the idea.
If I tried to institute the kind of insanity 3E is trying to operate on, my players would walk inside of an hour. Holden & co. are perfectly within their rights to sell such a system, but I'm also permitted to object to the idea.
This sounds like a gaming group that would honestly be better served taking up a different hobby, because they apparently find mathematical equations to be a superior form of entertainment than building a narrative, or pursuing character arcs, or shooting the shit with NPCs, or really any of the things that tabletop RPGs like Exalted are supposed to be offering.
On the whole 'abilities balanced differently' point.
It'd propably help if there was, for example, a short and easy way to consolidate multiple rolls.
Specifically, multiples of the exact same roll that you can't afford to fail even once are consolidated into a single roll with an appropriately hefty penalty large enough that a given skill level has the exact same chance at succeeding at it as he would at the multiple ones. Examples; Defense, prolonged Stealth. Meanwhile multiple rolls where you only have to succeed once (Offense, Awareness vs. the aforementioned prolonged stealth) are a single roll that actually has a considerable bonus, because you get multiple tries. Degrees of success can determine how often you succeed/fail at any given repeated task.
This also has the advantage of letting people choose how granular they want their actions to be.
I mean, I'm not a game designer, but that's how I'd do it. Similar solutions propably exist for other problems of balancing abilities around the same difficulty scale via modifiers.
It'd propably help if there was, for example, a short and easy way to consolidate multiple rolls.
Specifically, multiples of the exact same roll that you can't afford to fail even once are consolidated into a single roll with an appropriately hefty penalty large enough that a given skill level has the exact same chance at succeeding at it as he would at the multiple ones. Examples; Defense, prolonged Stealth. Meanwhile multiple rolls where you only have to succeed once (Offense, Awareness vs. the aforementioned prolonged stealth) are a single roll that actually has a considerable bonus, because you get multiple tries. Degrees of success can determine how often you succeed/fail at any given repeated task.
This also has the advantage of letting people choose how granular they want their actions to be.
I mean, I'm not a game designer, but that's how I'd do it. Similar solutions propably exist for other problems of balancing abilities around the same difficulty scale via modifiers.
...what? That is a entirely DIFFERENT group. People don't need to like Math to like the dice tricks. And even if they DO like math and dice trick, where are you getting this crap about "Don't like Narrative, or shooting the shit with NPC's?"
(I don't particularly care about dice tricks one way or the other but really...)
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Yes, it does, because those circumstances ARE your parameters. Let me break this down for you:
Lets imagine a spitball-system scenario where you want to make a surgery roll on an internal organ (call it Difficulty 3), but you lack proper tools (-2 External for this example), are operating in a dirty field (-1 External), and are trying not to kill this wounded man (need 4 or higher threshold successes to avoid Health level loss from internal bleeding, an Astonishing feat, by 2e post-successes rules). Now, assuming that Medicine worked like this, what can we draw from this?
That a surgeon without access to sanitary conditions and a doctors kit will always be operating at a minimum of Difficulty 4 (Diff 1 with a -3, or needing 8 dice for a coin-flip's chance), and 7 for internal mucking-about before other factors come in, requiring a pool of 14 dice to make his 50/50 chances, and 21 if he wants a more comfortable 90ish. That's a System Baseline created from an action. Which jumps up to Difficulty 11 to avoid blood loss, or 22 and 33 dice respectively, if you're not cutting willy-nilly.
Yes, Charms can offset or nullify these things, and whichever Charm creates tools or offsets the penalty for lacking them will be worth roughly 4-6 dice from an Excellency when you get down to it. But when you write a system, you must always assume an unprepared and unequipped character in the attempt, or else your baseline is a Shitty one which requires characters to be masters in their field with all the trimmings and trappings right out from Chargen to accomplish basic gameplay tasks.
THAT is how you work this kind of system, on the action-and-context level, not by using "how many charms have you purchased" as a measurement. Those Medicine Charms are a moving goalpost and not a coherent whole unless you have All of them to work from initially, which flies entirely in the face of having them be individual-purchase options anyway, while an action must have all its conditions laid out beforehand so that players can engage with it meaningfully. Judging by the way Ex3 loves its Charms, there will Always be more of them to buy piecemeal, so that goalpost doesn't seem to have a capacity for stopping anytime soon either, no matter how "locked" you assume future books will keep it or its dice cap, sight-unseen.
And if they have Penultimate Unity of Form it doesn't even matter which they pick!
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Regarding "Excellencies are boring":
I've quoted a few of the opinions on this issue, and we had a chat, and some of the things he said might be interesting. So I'm relaying the opinions:
Additional observations of my own:
Influenced by those observations, he proposed an idea (that is unlikely to be implemented in our campaign, because he doesn't want to go system-tinkering) that perhaps it would be best to design Excellency-like bonuses as completely passive and always-on. His concept of it involved having the right to buy five more dice of a skill for Solars. My opinion was to instead just say that any purchased Excellencies and Excellency-related Charms (Infinite, Flow, Transcendent etc.) should count as providing a flat bonus instead (likely equivalent to 4 dice or 2 successes), while retaining the same Charm Dice Caps as in the RAW. Note that since most other Charms have Skill Level prerequisites, this means that while purchasing Excellencies produces raw difficulty-surpassing bonuses, it commonly is still insufficient for getting the best Charms, so people will still buy Skills themselves too.
Does this sound like a mechanically bad idea?
I've quoted a few of the opinions on this issue, and we had a chat, and some of the things he said might be interesting. So I'm relaying the opinions:
- People rarely spend an intermediate amount of motes on Excellencies. Either they spend as much as they can, or they spend as much as they can recover using Stunts.
- He considers it illogical that an Exalt can switch between "I know Kung Fu" and "I am the grandmaster of Kung Fu" (or, worse yet, of some more cerebral skill) at a moment's notice, there and back again.
- He wonders if perhaps Excellencies in their current incarnation are essentially a Mote Sink (much like MMOs have Gold Sinks), and thinks such a function isn't exactly desirable on its own.
Additional observations of my own:
- Whether one can rely on Excellencies alone depends too much on whether a given task is resolved using one or many rolls, and whether this is predictable. E.g. combats generally call for using Infinite Ability (if one has the chance to use it safely), while stuff like the occasional Awareness roll will be used on its own. Removing Infinite Ability from the game entirely will only produce a situation where tasks requiring many rolls are no longer viable targets for Excellencies, and that seems like the metagame influencing Excellency choice too much.
- Task Difficulty inflation tends to produce situations where instead of choosing whether to use Motes on an important task as a tradeoff, it's just a case where one is forced to use them, because otherwise there is no chance of success, while a failure is too unacceptable.
Influenced by those observations, he proposed an idea (that is unlikely to be implemented in our campaign, because he doesn't want to go system-tinkering) that perhaps it would be best to design Excellency-like bonuses as completely passive and always-on. His concept of it involved having the right to buy five more dice of a skill for Solars. My opinion was to instead just say that any purchased Excellencies and Excellency-related Charms (Infinite, Flow, Transcendent etc.) should count as providing a flat bonus instead (likely equivalent to 4 dice or 2 successes), while retaining the same Charm Dice Caps as in the RAW. Note that since most other Charms have Skill Level prerequisites, this means that while purchasing Excellencies produces raw difficulty-surpassing bonuses, it commonly is still insufficient for getting the best Charms, so people will still buy Skills themselves too.
Does this sound like a mechanically bad idea?
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- Gladstone, OR
It's a bit too late for me to really analyze your post @vicky_molokh , but I want to toss this out as an aside:
Difficulty inflation is a problem because of poor communication on part of (second edition at least) itself as a set of rules. It does not clearly hammer home that exceptions to the 1-5 scale are just that, exceptions. This includes, in abstract, Defense Values. (We must accept that DVs get MUCH higher though for various reasons, that's tangential to this post).
Anyway- the point is, the game should make it clear that difficulty either should not go too high (describing in terms of best practices), or make it mechanically impossible for it to go too high. This means providing a set of rules for storytellers to use when determining the difficulty of an action, which would include metrics for Difficulty, internal/external penalties, required threshold successes and so on.
Difficulty inflation is a problem because of poor communication on part of (second edition at least) itself as a set of rules. It does not clearly hammer home that exceptions to the 1-5 scale are just that, exceptions. This includes, in abstract, Defense Values. (We must accept that DVs get MUCH higher though for various reasons, that's tangential to this post).
Anyway- the point is, the game should make it clear that difficulty either should not go too high (describing in terms of best practices), or make it mechanically impossible for it to go too high. This means providing a set of rules for storytellers to use when determining the difficulty of an action, which would include metrics for Difficulty, internal/external penalties, required threshold successes and so on.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
I agree that difficulty inflation is largely a matter of GMing style. This is something where the GM and I disagree:
His opinion comes closer to "when telling stories about Exalts, tasks that they find in their adventures should be worthy of exalts, such as managing to jump through a narrow opening that is only safe for a small fraction of a second)", while I'm more of an opinion that tasks should be whatever seems most appropriate in the context of a setting and not necessarily of the specific campaign/party (i.e. harder tasks shouldn't show up more frequently just because the party consists of Exalts; they should come up if the party decides to go on a quest that is necessarily harder, but this should be the party's choice). In fact, disagreements such as this one are probably the major reason why I separated my observations and his.
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
It's safe to say that there is a middle ground. Sometimes you NEED higher difficulties (or equivalents). But, generally speaking, 2e at least assumes 'Heroics' are doing it and that's about it. Oh, Diff 6+ can be considered an implicit nod to Charm-use, but not always.