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Sympathy for the heretic

strange_person said:
That's the kind of thing I meant by statistical distribution. A single guardsman could take down ten space marines, theoretically... if he happened to have a decent anti-armor weapon, and enough of his shots hit, while the marines either kept missing or were busy with something other than shooting back. An overweight adept with a sharp stick might somehow disembowel a Charnel Daemon. The Guy Who Cried Grendel - 1d4chan Wouldn't be the smart way to bet, but it's a big galaxy, billion-to-one chances happen somewhere every day. Either side winning an ongoing fight is generally within the bounds of possibility, because if it weren't, that fight would already be over.
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Okay.

Look. Let me just walk things back a step here.

Do you try to use "hit points" as a term to describe events that happen in real life, as a serious attempt to understand the reality you live in and not just as a joke or something? I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no,' but I want to be sure before I talk about this any more.

The high meta-level concepts I particularly want to wrestle with here (and I do realize I haven't been expressing that very well, by wandering in the weeds of specific implementation, but I'm not sure how else to approach the subject) are about what else can and should be within those bounds of possibility. If an anti-fascist message is to be effectively conveyed, to prove Göring wrong in his "butter merely makes us fat" claim, to show that fighting may sometimes be necessary but cannot yield true success in itself, relevant alternatives must first be presented - 'item' and 'run' and whatever else - with plausible results thereof laid out clearly enough for the choice to be meaningful.
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True, and I liked how you discussed this in terms of "livening up" the RPG mechanics associated with trade and development, even though I don't actually play the game you're modifying.

The problem is that this specific project breaks down into two branches. One which would involve telling stories of building, and one which would involve playing games of building. This thread is much much more about stories than about games of any kind.
 
Personally, I think Warhammer lore would be better if it did reflect the reality of the tabletop more. Spess Mehreens being so far beyond regular humans that they can tear through hundreds of them without threat is less interesting to me than the Guardsmen having a decent chance of being able to kill them so long as they have a 10-to-1 advantage.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Do you try to use "hit points" as a term to describe events that happen in real life, as a serious attempt to understand the reality you live in and not just as a joke or something? I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no,' but I want to be sure before I talk about this any more.
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I do not. "Hit points" are a convenient abstraction for game purposes, modeling a living system's entropic breakdown in numbers coarse enough for kindergarten math, but actual medical science and/or structural engineering represent the truth far better, when available.
 
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strange_person said:
I do not. "Hit points" are a convenient abstraction for game purposes, modeling a living system's entropic breakdown in numbers coarse enough for kindergarten math, but actual medical science and/or structural engineering represent the truth far better, when available.
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Okay. Then you have a healthy, well-developed concept that certain abstractions simply do not model reality as such, and are not applicable to reality as such. They can exist or, importantly, not exist, within a separate, internally consistent secondary world crafted by an author, as relevant physical laws or parameters governing the course of events.

Are we in agreement here?
 
strange_person said:
I'm somewhat torn between simply agreeing so you'll move on to the actual point, and expressing my frustration at the garden-path approach by quibbling over what seems like potential setup of a false dichotomy.
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Both is fine.

First, my point is what it has always been. Namely, that rules that exist within a secondary world may simply not exist within the real primary world. Or the reverse may be true. And rules that exist within one secondary world do not necessary exist in all others. Rules that exist and are valid as tools for modeling what happens in a tabletop RPG may not be good tools for discussing the underlying realities of the broader setting. Game mechanics in the game created to be played by players are not necessarily real mechanics that apply to the underlying world the game is played in.
 
The third option is that a rule or model's validity is not a strict binary matter, but rather one of degrees of correlation with truth (or some other know-it-when-I-see-it goal, such as game balance or emotionally satisfying narrative), and performance refinements trade off against operating costs. Newton's laws are less strictly correct than Relativity, but close enough in common use cases, and far easier to compute. Relativistic models of gravity, in turn, are less strictly correct than whatever theory will eventually be developed to reconcile it with quantum mechanics.

It's hard to get people excited about peacetime and macroeconomics, compared to tragedy and explosions. Fascism specializes in the latter at the expense of the former, so I think changing that balance - by building models and rules which make a (fictitious but relatable) healthy peacetime economy, civil rights, etc. easier to engage with, "win at," see the benefits of, and thus get excited about, particularly in contexts where tragedy and explosions clearly still work as they should so it can't be claimed the fight was rigged - could potentially erode the base of support for fascism in a small but very lasting, river-flows-to-the-sea sort of way.
But for that to work, the new models can't be as hard to learn and use as relativity or modern medical science. Got to take subtle concepts like rule of law, public trust, externalities, comparative advantage, respect, smash it all up into a user-friendly coarse-grained approximation from which some underlying truths can nonetheless be reliably re-derived.
 
Simon_Jester said:
What I mean is that novelizations will routinely include elements that are impossible under game mechanics but that are straightforwardly possible in real life. For instance, in tabletop Warhammer 40k, as I understand it, ten Space Marines will almost invariably fail to defeat 100 competently handled Imperial Guardsmen or equivalent human soldiers unless loaded down with a truly ridiculous amount of wargear and special heroic options. In a novelization, we would expect the opposite result. The difference is so remarkable that Games Workshop at some point published a description of "Movie Marines" that actually perform on the tabletop as advertised in the side-content.

And that's fine
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It's not really fine.

The fact that there are major disconnects in the capability of space marines between the tabletop rules, tabletop fluff, novels, and various video game adapations is a flaw in the WH40k setting. It's a flaw that the fanbase is very used to and has adaped around like a missing stair, but the setting does not have to be like that.

More generally, while game rules cannot cover every possibility, unless they are deliberatly absract they should attempt to portray an accurate representation of normal. Like the fact that a tyranid warrior has 3 wounds and bolters do one damage does not mean that its impossible in fiction for a warrior to die in one shot, but it does mean that said shot was exceptionally lucky or skilled to be so far outside the bounds of normal presented in the game. If your adaptation has such shots be made trivially, you have done a bad job adapting WH40k.
 
mr_stibbons said:
It's not really fine.

The fact that there are major disconnects in the capability of space marines between the tabletop rules, tabletop fluff, novels, and various video game adapations is a flaw in the WH40k setting. It's a flaw that the fanbase is very used to and has adaped around like a missing stair, but the setting does not have to be like that.
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In practice, its a consequence of having multiple adaptations even out there.

Having Necron gauss flayers disintegrate holes through power armor on the tabletop can be quite compelling. If you want to make an RPG where even a single Necron warrior is a big deal, you can keep that. If you want to make a video game where Necrons fight Space Marines and both sides have useful numbers of hit points and you're not constantly being vaporized by Necrons at the point of contact, your game is not necessarily a bad game as such.

Because it's more important that a project stand upon its own merits, than that it laboriously and intricately obey a continuity bible, so long as the very basic spirit of the overarching franchise is preserved.

More generally, while game rules cannot cover every possibility, unless they are deliberatly absract they should attempt to portray an accurate representation of normal. Like the fact that a tyranid warrior has 3 wounds and bolters do one damage does not [mean that its impossible in fiction for a warrior to die in one shot, but it does mean that said shot was exceptionally lucky or skilled to be so far outside the bounds of normal presented in the game. If your adaptation has such shots be made trivially, you have done a bad job adapting WH40k.
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Yesbut, in that there are exceptions. Specifically, some game mechanics exist specifically to enable that particular kind of game and its necessary mechanics, and they are NOT inherently reflections of the reality of the secondary world. For instance, many game engines have concepts like "luck points" or "fate points" that can be used to achieve good results that aren't normally possible, or to alter the outcome of adverse dice rolls. These concepts (discretized, countable chunks of 'luck' that sort of float around and can be intentionally spent in a crisis) simply do not map to what necessarily exists in the secondary world the game is set in. They are purely a mechanization created to make it possible to have a game with well defined rules that are fun to play.

And that's my point.

Using RPG mechanics to discuss the broader secondary world that exists outside those RPG mechanics is usually a bad idea, unless the RPG mechanics themselves strongly define that particular secondary world (e.g. a D&D-based world in which wizards objectively do have levels and use Vancian spellcasting principles and very specifically do have all the limitations and capabilities of a D&D wizard).
 
Simon_Jester said:
These concepts (discretized, countable chunks of 'luck' that sort of float around and can be intentionally spent in a crisis) simply do not map to what necessarily exists in the secondary world the game is set in.
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In the case of infamy (in Black Crusade) and Fate Points (in the other FFG rpgs), particularly fate points being applied through faith talents, in-setting concept being represented is intervention by a distant supernatural patron - usually subtle, but as real as a credit rating or bank balance.
 
strange_person said:
In the case of infamy (in Black Crusade) and Fate Points (in the other FFG rpgs), particularly fate points being applied through faith talents, in-setting concept being represented is intervention by a distant supernatural patron - usually subtle, but as real as a credit rating or bank balance.
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Yes, but in the main secondary world, it doesn't come in discretized, countable chunks. And you don't get to decide when it's used in your favor.

Only in the game, with game mechanics, does it work that way. Which is fine because it makes the game better, but also means that the way the game handles the concept is not applicable to the broader setting.

Ciaphas Cain doesn't have a set number of Fate points, in other words, be that number small or large. And it's misleading to talk about him as though he does.
 
Who says which secondary world is the main one? Surely there's some point where excessive luck or supernatural favor lavished on Ciaphas Cain would break a reader's suspension of disbelief, get him dismissed as a Marty Stu - and conversely, a minimum amount below which he would no longer hold attention as a "hero of the imperium," instead becoming merely "Ciaphas Cain, guy who did some plausible stuff" or even "Ciaphas Cain, minor contributor to this roadside pile of skulls." You're claiming that scale can't be quantified... then admit that in games it already has been, to useful effect. Final draft of a novel doesn't need to lay out the quantification explicitly because all the other ways the narrative could have gone are trimmed away and hidden, but a general algorithm for writing new stories can't just handwave that constraint, or it'll end up like trying to design GPS satellites with Ptolemaic orbital mechanics.
 
strange_person said:
Who says which secondary world is the main one?
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As a general rule, it is best if the main secondary world is whichever one is least larded down with odd little mechanics that we know, out-of-story, exist in the form that they do entirely because of the desire to make the game entertaining to play.

Because such mechanics unfailingly damage suspension of disbelief (at worst) or become grounds for comedy and parody (at best) when openly included in versions of the setting that don't involve that mode of gameplay.

If someone makes a first-person shooter and a movie about the same events, it may well be no surprise that the first-person shooter includes a mechanic where a character has a small health pool that regenerates rapidly when they're behind cover. That's a common FPS mechanic. But if the same mechanic is present in the movie, such that people are routinely regenerating from gunshot wounds in a matter of seconds, but die as soon as they're shot twice, that will break suspension of disbelief.

40k is no exception to this pattern.
 
So, whichever one isn't a game, because you've never seen a game done well, or non-game fiction done badly?

To clarify, most of the parts you liked in the post I jumped into this thread with were derived from treating backward compatibility with the tabletop wargame (an earlier edition, but I doubt the relevant specifics have changed) and RPGs as a creative constraint, while utterly discarding the more narrative elements of the corresponding fiction. You are saying that the main thing which works for me, cannot work.
 
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strange_person said:
So, whichever one isn't a game, because you've never seen a game done well, or non-game fiction done badly?
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See, here's the problem.

What does "done well" mean, in the context of different types of fiction?

Consider good old AD&D from fifty-ish years ago. The game worked very well in practice, despite all its quirks (THAC0!), because it enabled the easy creation and exploration of lots of fantasy settings. But when people created spinoff novels, you know what disappeared? Characters in a book inspired by a D&D setting (e.g. Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance) don't talk about hit points or saving throws! This isn't because hit points or saving throws made D&D worse. It's because they'd make a novel worse, because they have no place in the underlying secondary world.

Consider Magic: The Gathering. Massively successful tabletop card game. Sells a sizeable number of spinoff novels set in the various secondary worlds created to 'explain' the cards it releases. You know what usually doesn't make it from the tabletop game into the novels? The distinction between an "Instant," a "Sorcery," and an "Enchantment." Or the precise counting of mana into discretized 'motes.' Or deck mechanics. Why not? Because all of that would sound really dumb if you tried with a straight face to integrate it into the plot of a novel. Because while these rules are vital to the tabletop card game, they would, again, undermine the underlying secondary world.

Just about the only way to do good non-game art that does deliberately include game mechanic rules as laws of nature that have real meaning is to inject a lot of parody and meta-humor into the story, as was done very well with Erfworld.

To clarify, most of the parts you liked in the post I jumped into this thread with were derived from treating backward compatibility with the tabletop wargame (an earlier edition, but I doubt the relevant specifics have changed) and RPGs as a creative constraint, while utterly discarding the more narrative elements of the corresponding fiction. You are saying that the main thing which works for me, cannot work.
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The thing I liked was that you were exploring narrative ideas involving logistics, construction, creation, and the entertaining played-for-laughs potential of warp travel's spatiotemporal fuckery.

None of this has anything to do with fate points or hit points or whatever. That is the point. When generalizing off a game of any kind into the secondary world the game is intended to model, it is almost never a good idea to fixate on game mechanics. And the more contrived the game mechanic is as a way to make an otherwise very abstract or very complex system "legible" to the players, the more counterproductive that fixation is.
 
Simon_Jester said:
But when people created spinoff novels, you know what disappeared? Characters in a book inspired by a D&D setting (e.g. Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance) don't talk about hit points or saving throws! This isn't because hit points or saving throws made D&D worse. It's because they'd make a novel worse, because they have no place in the underlying secondary world.
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While I mostly agree I have seen "saving throws" and similar things in both D&D inspired works* and otherwise. The gods (or equivalent) throwing dice over the fates of mortals is just too evocative an image, it gets used in a fair amount of works.


* In Quag Keep (one of the very first) the characters had mysterious un-removable bracelets embedded with dice that would occasionally just start spinning. Notably they soon figured out that when the dice started to move they needed to look out for whatever was going to happen.
 
Okay, but that ties into the observation that the way to make it work is generally to make it very meta, and "very meta" fiction is a specialized subset of "good fiction in general," not the whole thing.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The thing I liked was that you were exploring narrative ideas involving logistics, construction, creation, and the entertaining played-for-laughs potential of warp travel's spatiotemporal fuckery.

None of this has anything to do with fate points or hit points or whatever. That is the point. When generalizing off a game of any kind into the secondary world the game is intended to model, it is almost never a good idea to fixate on game mechanics.
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Not actually the post I was referring to - I meant back on june 26th. I got a lot of those ideas for recontextualizing Sisters of Battle by looking at their army list in Codex: Witchhunters for 4e, and Codex: Assassins and others, strictly crunch (and some of the pictures, but to the extent those constrain tournament-legal paint jobs I figure it counts as rules), "C'tan phase swords ignore all armor, even invulnerable saves" and "infantry unit with an attached priest can't use heavy weapons effectively due to agitation / distraction" and so on, discarding any 'lore' not thus represented, re-deriving: given a tolerably non-fascist cultural context, what problem would this unit type, this ongoing practice, be the best available solution to? Without the mechanics defining those units, can't even start to ask that question.

So, you claim it's never a good idea? Disproof by counterexample: Your "ass-laughed-off syndrome" came directly from my fixating on mechanics.

You want the logistics and construction but you don't want the math, and I just can't do that. Wanting to get rid of the math pisses me off, because without the foundation of math "abbadon equals abbadon" means nothing at all to me. Resource-allocation problems minus accountancy are posturing rather than policy, and correspondingly unpersuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree with a whole heap of implicit assumptions and value judgements.
 
strange_person said:
Not actually the post I was referring to - I meant back on june 26th. I got a lot of those ideas for recontextualizing Sisters of Battle by looking at their army list in Codex: Witchhunters for 4e, and Codex: Assassins and others, strictly crunch (and some of the pictures, but to the extent those constrain tournament-legal paint jobs I figure it counts as rules), "C'tan phase swords ignore all armor, even invulnerable saves" and "infantry unit with an attached priest can't use heavy weapons effectively due to agitation / distraction" and so on, discarding any 'lore' not thus represented, re-deriving: given a tolerably non-fascist cultural context, what problem would this unit type, this ongoing practice, be the best available solution to? Without the mechanics defining those units, can't even start to ask that question.

So, you claim it's never a good idea? Disproof by counterexample: Your "ass-laughed-off syndrome" came directly from my fixating on mechanics.
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I don't think you understand what it is that I'm criticizing.

Using a game ruleset for inspiration is different from insisting on trying to use game mechanics as the underlying physics when one is not actually discussing the game.

Consider two creative processes:

1) "C'tan phase swords ignore all armor, including invulnerable saves" becomes
2) "C'tan phase swords can cut through effectively anything" becomes
3) "C'tan phase swords are not at all safe to use if you can't handle normal equipment safely and carefully."

Versus:

1) "This battle tank has 50 HP, antitank rockets do 3d8 damage, and the crit damage multiplier is x2."
2) "Therefore, this battle tank cannot be disabled by a single rocket; it will still have 2 HP left in the worst case."
3) "Therefore, I will remark on how in a good story, this battle tank has the remarkable quality that it is never, ever disabled by a single rocket hit."

In the first case, we notice that the underlying mechanics (everyone is literally rolling dice to see whether their protections deflect enemy attacks) are entirely abstracted out. We have "laundered" the game rules into an abstract concept ("sword that cuts virtually anything") that can exist without insisting that the underlying game rules are relevant as physics within the story we are telling. Plenty of settings where 'armor saves' are absolutely nowhere in the setting's DNA will nonetheless contain the concept of "cut-anything swords." Having done this, we are now free to tell pretty much any story we like about the sword.

In the second case, the underlying mechanics remain the focus of the decision regarding storytelling and analysis of the story. The reader is not supposed to ever forget that the tank has hit points. The unfortunate result of this is that if we are imagining the secondary world as a place we can imagine living in, and we have a rough, reasonably accurate idea of how mechanical vehicles work... It becomes nearly impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief while calling attention to the conceit that tanks actually do have hit points. It's like walking into a theater during a movie and screaming "MY GOD, THEY'RE ALL ACTORS!" One is not merely revealing the man behind the curtain; one is demanding that all eyes focus on him. This, essentially, works only as a joke.

The thing I'm criticizing isn't "being inspired by RPG/tabletop game mechanics." It's "expecting the rules of those games to be weighty ideas with plot significance, in and of themselves, without being laundered through a layer of abstraction."

You want the logistics and construction but you don't want the math, and I just can't do that. Wanting to get rid of the math pisses me off, because without the foundation of math "abbadon equals abbadon" means nothing at all to me. Resource-allocation problems minus accountancy are posturing rather than policy, and correspondingly unpersuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree with a whole heap of implicit assumptions and value judgements.
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I feel like you're conflating things that very much are about material logistics (e.g. physically building colony infrastructure while playing a tabletop game) and things that aren't (e.g. whether, outside the context of game-playing, the powers of Chaos intercede and bend physics to keep a servant alive).
 
I think that Simon_Jester's point can be summarized as this.

"We don't want to get rid of the math. It's just that game-mechanics math is actually wrong, doesn't represent the setting accurately/at all and doesn't exist anywhere except for the game itself."
 
DestinyPlayer said:
It's just that game-mechanics math is actually wrong, doesn't represent the setting accurately/at all
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I'm sorry, did you miss the part where I proposed a laundry-list of changes to game mechanics for the purpose of better aligning and integrating them with accurate / desirable representation of the setting? If I thought that system was already perfect I wouldn't be talking about how to fix it.
 
strange_person said:
I'm sorry, did you miss the part where I proposed a laundry-list of changes to game mechanics for the purpose of better aligning and integrating them with accurate / desirable representation of the setting? If I thought that system was already perfect I wouldn't be talking about how to fix it.
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Reality-accurate game mechanics make for a horrible game, unless you make it the primary point of the work (i.e. Arma games and other simulators).
Game-accurate setting mechanics make for a horrible setting, unless you make it the primary point of the work (i.e. LitRPG settings and other "game mechanics actually exist in-universe as game mechanics" settings)

So either you would be completely throwing away the very idea of Warhammer being a game, in which case why are you bothering with game mechanics in the first place, or you're writing a heavily meta "HP and Levels are actually a thing in-universe" setting while refusing to admit you are doing so.

There is no real functional compromise there. You can't achieve both.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
We have "laundered" the game rules
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This is not exactly contradicting my impression of explicit math being considered repulsive, shameful, unclean.

Your ATGM example is flawed, anyway, since it assumes a tank initially in perfect condition (rather than softened up by prior small-arms fire, terrain hazards, missed maintenance...), lack of options by which a gunner could add bonus damage, and generally the rules being so narrow - or the fictional situation so thoroughly defined - as to exclude any weird corner cases. Proving negatives is hard in any context complex enough to be interesting.
Also, it's predicated on an "anti-tank" weapon apparently being defined in-game as fairly bad at killing tanks, which seems like it could be a SoD problem even without specific jarring abstractions. That's the sort of thing I meant by "never seen a game done well" - obviously a close, faithful adaptation of nonsense will be more nonsense.

If 'favor with the dark gods' is the exact thing someone's strategically trying to build up, or tap to produce tangible results, tracking it precisely is just as appropriate as addressing soil chemistry in a game or story about farming.
 
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