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Messages - tanis

#1
Merry Christmas, everyone, and happy holidays!
#2
Announcements and News / Re: The Pirate Song
November 25, 2023, 05:52:36 PM
Congratulations on completing a long-term project, however long postponed!

I'm working on some research for a school paper at the moment, but I'll attend to it when I'm free.  :D
#3
Announcements and News / Re: World of Khoras Forum Update
November 25, 2023, 05:50:22 PM
It's quite alright.

In fact, it's loading correctly on my browser now, which it hadn't been for a while due to an OS switch, so yay!
#4
Announcements and News / Re: When it rains it pours
July 27, 2023, 11:46:28 PM
Sorry for your losses, both of you. My parents have been ailing a bit as well, and I know it's devastating when the worst arrives. Good luck with your surgery, as well.
#5
Quote from: Drul Morbok on September 15, 2022, 01:08:13 PM
Unfortunately, the 5-feet increments translate into increments of 1.5 meter, which is a bit awkward.
But when describing any distance or size, I use the metric system.

That's exactly what I was thinking of with regards to combat. Five feet is pretty much exactly the natural basis of distance in hand-to-hand and melee combat, because of human proportions, and it doesn't convert to an integer number of meters, which makes things awkward to deal with. I suppose that's what happens when you derive your base unit from a planetary basis rather than a human one. Inherently good for measuring planets, not necessarily as good for measuring people-centric things.

I (and Dave) obviously have the advantage of being based in the US where most people are more familiar with US Standard units than metric ones, so it's easy to just say, "Just use the cleaner option.", but it does force one to consider how to proceed outside of the Anglosphere—which is the only place where most people are likely to have a ton of familiarity with British Imperial or US Standard units (I've known Brits who remain Imperial-dominant, as well as Brits for whom Imperial is as alien as it is to the French, who invented metric and have used it for centuries)—and I agree with you and Dave. It's probably easier to either plan ahead of time to put in the work to localize everything, or else to include both.

Of course, then you have to deal with the procedural necessities stemming from either of those decisions, but that's as may be.
#6
As I have also, quietly (if not particularly actively of late), been working on an RPG system of my own, I've also thought about this, and I'm kind of two minds about it.

On the one hand, I think that, at the end of the day, anything we do as game designers needs to be for the benefit of play. I've made no secret of my personal preference for trying to foster verisimilitude to support players' suspension of disbelief, even to the point of actively attempting to subconsciously retrain mistaken intuitions through more historically grounded play abstractions, but... if the players can't actually relate to or understand our mechanics, then they can't effectively interact with the game.

In short, many systems need to be, at the end of the day, geared primarily toward reducing cognitive load and rendering our system usable. When it comes to measurements in a tactical combat- and exploration-focused game, this means providing people with whatever standard weights and measures they're familiar with, so that they can picture and intuitively grasp relative distances and such, without the additional barrier of needing to learn and build new intuitions from whole cloth with unfamiliar units that they might only ever interact with in the realm of fantasy—especially if it's their habit to run entirely theater-of-the-mind games.

On the other hand, I think that game worlds are an opportunity to explore historical and theoretical systems and standards of measure, as well as cultural systems very different to those of European systems whose primary reason for dominance is simply that they had been adopted by societies which became global hegemons in our actual past; the metric system is great in terms of standardization, but there are actually all manner of fascinating historical systems, and there are systems not based on the decimal system which are, in many ways, far superior to the metric system, and which could be standardized upon today, however unlikely such adoption might be at this point. Both from an historical and a worldbuilding perspective, it's easy to see the value in using unfamiliar systems, even if only insofar as most people outside the Anglosphere and Commonwealth countries aren't terribly familiar with US Standard or British Imperial measurements.

Personally, though, I like using feet primarily because the scale of that unit is particularly well-suited to the sorts of distances relevant to combat, and makes the math a bit cleaner. Having said that, I imagine that in the event of attempting to localize my game, I will inevitably convert everything to metric in order to privilege the players over their characters.

GMs are of course perfectly welcome to use in-fiction units, and I imagine some particularly nerdy players would be thrilled to explore the intricacies of societies with standards of weights and measures based on locally important agricultural products, regional terrain features, or even metricized standards based on bases as diverse as 6, 12, 20, 60, and 42.

As an addendum to this, there's a YouTube channel I'm fond of which covers a fairly eclectic range of topics (though mostly constructed languages, spelling reforms, and the occasional bit of math nerdery) which has a number of good videos on different units and standards of weights and measures, and I think this is a good opportunity to share one of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJymKowx8cY

It's not the only one he has on the topic, but it tackles some of the common arguments about metric versus US/Imperial in an interesting and transformative way, and it might be of interest.

There's also this one, from Numberphile featuring Tom Scott, on various number systems around the world other than decimal, which might also be of interest, if only for worldbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc
#7
I understand that. I just like to collect as much inspirational/educational material as possible; I like honing skills, even if there's not an immediate payoff. I think it makes my baseline higher than if I focus just on what's immediately useful.

Besides, on the sort of timescale that a setting like Khoras has existed on—as opposed to a more standard session-to-session campaign timescale—there's always time to add little details, right?  ;)
#8
Really smart, cool question; and really well-thought out answer! :D
#9
I agree, those are all really interesting choices. One of the great things about having so many cool interrelations between, especially, the Rukemian Empire and all of its client states/protectorates.

Kitar is a great choice for an independence movement, Ormek could be a good choice for a slave revolt or revolutionary war, and the War Vales make for an excellent Italian Wars-style clusterfuck.  ;D

I'd be interested in hearing about what sort of campaign you're thinking about running.
#10
I don't really have any specific questions or comments that come to mind to accompany this video, but I'm sure if anyone takes the time to watch it, we'll have some interesting things to discuss regarding language, religion, ritual, etc. It's a Q&A that an Old Norse philologist whose YouTube videos I frequently watch had with a Sankrit/Avestan scholar he's friends with, and it covers a wide range of interesting and informative topics that make it worth watching in its own right, but which I also thought might provide a lot of inspiration for worldbuilding and gaming. It's not short, in fact it's almost 1.75 hours, but if anyone gets the time, I really encourage them to watch it; I found it quite enjoyable and stimulating, despite its length.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIkHgVSKQ4U
#11
General Discussion and Questions / Re: Horcrux
March 05, 2021, 03:55:09 PM
I can help with that last bit, Dave. On December 20, 1990, I was exactly two days shy of 9 months old. ;P

Jokes aside, the One Ring is also a horcrux. Say what you want about J. K. Rowling, but she did give us all a very handy name for a very specific sort of talisman. A worthwhile contribution to human knowledge, that.
#12
Yes and no. AD&D 2.0 had three damage types: bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing. That's a start.

First edition Pathfinder had weapon and armor integrity. Another piece.

I don't want to give too much away, but I think there is a way to fix things with tweaks and cleverness. At the same time, yeah, combat would still look quite different, regardless of how small the individual tweaks are, because the average RPG player's conception of how things work is fundamentally different than the physical reality. Spears would be a lot more common for one, as they were the dominant melee weapon on battlefields from the Paleolithic to the development of the socket bayonet. You wouldn't have silly two-handed mauls with unwieldably heavy heads being used as "warhammers" by human characters, etc. But the underlying fantasy doesn't really rely on that; people just have never known anything else, so they think it does.

D&D 5e has been a crucial part of the resurgence of tabletop RPGs over the past decade, and it has some genuine strengths over, say, 3.5; nevertheless, we can do better, and it's time to move on. If Wizards had cared more about the brand name than the mechanical brand, maybe they'd have done it, but now it's inevitable that people will make better games, and while those games probably won't replace D&D, they will supplement it, and provide an option for people who are looking for more from their games.
#13
It's funny that you say that, Drul, because what you're describing is so very different in focus and concern from what I was thinking about, while also being a neat parallel. It makes for a really good opportunity to discuss an important distinction. Stylistic preferences versus mechanical abstractions.

See, the concerns you raise are essentially focused on maintaining genre conventions and consistency of tone—you want to play pulp/genre staple characters, and you want them to feel like they're genre appropriate. In other words, you want stylized combat which revolves around feeling like choreographed fights in fiction, especially films, typically look. It's a stylistic concern, and you're looking for the result of the combat mechanics to look a certain way. The mechanics have a role in determining that, but your focus isn't directly on them, in and of themselves.

Me, on the other hand, while I tend to stylistically prefer fights which feel like actual fights I've been in or watched happen, I'm likewise happy to play a tightly focused, genre-specific game—and if I do, then sure, swashbucklers should feel like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. But that's not my number one preference, and to my mind, any sufficiently developed combat system, combined with the right approach on the part of the players and DM to describing and resolving combat, can meet that need. Where some mechanics excel or fall short for me isn't in their ability to be adapted to a particular style, but rather in how well the abstractions they choose support the fundamental truth of how combat would work, procedurally. It's the difference in feeling like a certain genre, and feeling like a certain activity.

It's important to lay out that distinction, because otherwise we're in danger of equivocating on which sense of feels like we mean from moment to moment. One is window-dressing, the other is framed in mechanical terms and can be adapted to fit whatever setting is appropriate, though some solutions may more comfortably support some genre conventions over others. If we get the mechanics right, hopefully the resulting system will look right in play; that's an important way to evaluate our success, but I find it more helpful to focus directly on the mechanical perspective, and trust that by making things work like they should, the rest will follow naturally. Let me see if I can illustrate how the difference in perspective affects the thought process, and thus the design decisions.

What I want procedurally, or mechanically, is for combat to move, not like it does in movies, where everything is choreographed and focused on spectacle and looking good on camera, but like it does in person; to be oriented around doing rather than watching. Real fights often don't make good spectacles, because bodies get intertwined and things get too chaotic for an audience to easily read the action; individual actions are often as direct and focused on doing damage safely as possible, and things tend to turn into a scrum that is difficult to make out if you're not actively participating. As a result, realistic fights aren't typically depicted on-screen, so people whose primary experience of combat is film and TV often have a warped perspective of how fights work. Actors strike at one another's weapons instead of their bodies, etc. It looks better and is easier to parse in a movie, but it doesn't feel right.

D&D fights, especially lethal ones with weapons and armor, often turn into—as you say—statically trading blows until one side drops. In real life, if I have a sword or a spear and I hit you, I might kill you with one hit, and vice versa. I don't want to die, so I'm not going to just stand there and give you the opportunity. Now, if I'm in armor, especially very protective armor like plate harness, then I might be functionally invulnerable to your weapon—depending on what it is—and thus move in with little hesitation. But if we're in our shirts and pants, I might not get in striking range at all until the moment I can seize upon an opening. Real sword duels—like those described in historical accounts or depicted in combat manuals, for example—often consisted of a period of very little overt action with a lot of cautious maneuvering and judging of the situation, followed by a brief and explosive exchange. Rinse and repeat. That's a bit of an oversimplification that I'm about to complicate, but it's a good framework from which to start.

Unarmored combats with weapons aren't like fist fights or brawls; they don't go on for extended periods with lots of back and forth slugging. They're like gunfights in classic Westerns; tension ramps up, someone moves to draw, then it's all over and one cowboy hits the ground.

Armored combat is different. If you're sufficiently armored, you can take at least some kinds of hits with impunity. So you focus less on avoiding hits, and more on making yours count. If you're a man-at-arms or knight wearing steel plates fighting peasant levies in padded armor, you just walk up and poke them. If you're the peasant levy, you hope to God you and your buddies can use your superior numbers to dogpile the knight and stab him in the face or groin (or some other convenient gap) before he can manage to cleave your skulls in two. Different weapons meet different needs. Weapons that are great for carving up unarmored foes don't do much against solid steel. Weapons intended for armored wielders can be shorter than equivalent weapons intended for people who could only afford a helmet and some padding. Armored combat also tends to happen at closer distance and to favor wrestling and grappling, to the point that a lot of European armored combat manuals show moves that look remarkably similar to jiujitsu. Lots of asymmetry, etc. Also, shields were a huge part of combat prior to the development of very protective plate armor, and combat with shields is a completely separate discussion entirely. They're far too rare in many campaigns. So on and so forth.

Hell, during the early Modern period—from the Wars of the Roses and War of the Spanish Armada through to the English Civil War and other similar conflicts of the 17th Century—heavily armored cavalrymen wore bullet-proofed (as in dented, usually in the breastplate, by a musket ball to prove it could stop them), fully-enclosed plate harnesses while riding with lances, swords, and pistols, all while arquebusiers, halberdiers, pikemen, and billmen in lighter armor fought in lines and squares. Then when they went home, they wore completely different clothing and used completely different weapons to get into duels and streetfights.

Now, to some degree combat is, like everything else, just description. I can satisfy either of our stylistic preferences with the same system. It's a matter of style and focus.

But regardless of the style I'm describing, the important thing is how to respond to procedural questions like: if I'm an adventurer in a world with lethal monsters, what level of armor is sufficient to the task of protecting me while also being realistic to wear for long periods of cross-country travel? What cultural and technological context am I trying to emulate at this particular moment? What weapon sets make up the standard picture of a nation's warriors? Who's going to be my opponent, and what does their loadout look like? What materials are things made out of? Can they be damaged or cause damage to my opponent's gear in turn? If I have a sub-optimal weapon for this particular match-up, what options do I have? Can I use my sword like a club? Is this a duel or a melee with multiple combatants on one or both sides? Maybe a full-scale pitched battle? How can the combat system reflect these material differences in fun and easily graspable ways that allow players' meaningful choices to extend to the things they carry instead of just their skills or what prop with 1d8 damage they want to carry to complement their image of their character, and all while avoiding crunch?

At the same time, the focus might not be on monsters, but on human opponents. Or on urban street combat rather than armored battles. Whatever the context, how can the mechanics address the relevant concerns in a way that does them justice, while also (ideally) supporting multiple and diverse stylistic goals?

I believe that with properly designed mechanics, those questions can be answered in a satisfying way, regardless of stylistic preferences.

Another way to put it might be: if I'm playing a game like D&D, am I going for a classic OD&D dungeon delve, where the focus is getting loot from dangerous and distant places and getting home alive? Or am I going for a murder hobo hack & slash focused on grappling with deadly foes and coming out victorious? Either way, both of those playstyles lend themselves to combat being lethal and high-stakes. But if I want to inhabit stories in those worlds that are comparable in depth and breadth to the stories people tell in less deadly campaigns, then the lethality of combat should change how my character is outfitted, and thus even if my orientation to play is genre-focused and swashbuckling rather than trying to be a simulation of historical combat for its own sake, my character will still look and act differently. Perhaps I'm telling the same story, but instead of Errol Flynn playing Captain Blood, it's Russel Crowe in Master and Commander. Both have naval combat, but one is highly stylized and the other, while still stylized, is stylized in a way that seeks to more believably mimic reality.

But those same mechanics could just as easily liven up the Errol Flynn style game, if they're designed correctly, because the point of verisimilitude isn't that we want to actually play out exactly what it's like to live in that world, just that we want enough of the real experience reflected in the game to inform and enrich our experience of the roleplaying. Even most people who really like "realism" don't want to have to experience every moment of every mundane action in minute detail, they just want the interactions they do have to feel like they're grounded in the real thing. Unless you specifically want full-on "Inigo Montoya being stabbed repeatedly only to be reinvigorated by his desire for revenge and suddenly overcome all injury as he progressively becomes more capable until finally besting his nemesis" level power fantasies, having the more "realistic" combat system isn't going to cause any issues for the table going for a more overtly stylized result.

While that probably didn't address any specific thought you had, hopefully it lays out a perspective on how lower-level mechanical choices can influence the sorts of higher-level design considerations you're talking about.
#14
Miscellaneous / Re: winter weather
February 21, 2021, 10:13:27 PM
Luckily, everything is relatively fine here in Tennessee, just a tiny bit of sleet and whatnot for a couple of days, basically. I don't think it actually snowed, though it did a while back, randomly.

But then, we're subtropical down here, so...

Like, our weather is pretty much literally Olympia but hot, and with a river instead of Puget Sound.
#15
Thanks, man. Hopefully it all comes together soon.