Sunday, June 2, 2019

Time Efficient & Bragging Rights

I live in a state of wonder.

Yesterday, Homer2101 wrote of my decay rules,
"New items' markup doesn't justify the 2.5 extra average degradation rolls. The discount for worn and shabby items doesn't offset their reduced life expectancy under stress. Used items are always most cost-efficient ..."

I honestly don't know how people who live in this world can exist so blithely unaware of how human beings think.  How pervasive is the shot in the image shown, of people waiting many hours for the first touch of a phone they could buy without waiting a week later?  Does Homer not realize that there are players ~ some who I have had play in my game ~ who would throw away an item the second it became "used"?  Just because?  That is how they would see their characters.

I think it's great that Homer crunched the numbers.  It's useful information, and the fact that numbers can be crunched shows how potentially reliable the system is for actual play.  But we do ourselves a disservice when we think the game boils down to how the numbers dictate we should play.  And it astounds me that ~ although there are many people who will never buy anything new, on principle ~ that anyone talking about the subject can be so cognitively dissonant about the way that humans think.  People won't buy "new" because it is cost effective.  They'll buy new because it is "new."  They don't care about the cost.  The gold in their pocket doesn't mean as much to them, as it might to others.  They're adventurers.  There will always be more gold.  But something that is new, is fleeting.

Hell.  Even a new gold piece has a special worthiness that surpasses the value of the metal.  If I were playing a character, and had just bought a new shield, I would look at my fellow player and his used shield and smirk.  "Are you still using that crappy old thing?  Mine is new!"  Oh, what a prick I would be, bragging about my new shield.

Another example, another concern.  The image on the left is the ThinQ Alexa "smart" refridgerator.  You've most likely heard about it.  It is a micromanager that enables you to scan every item of food you put into your refridgerator, so that you can scan it again as you take it out, so the item can keep track of what you have and what you've eaten.  Presumedly, how many calories you're consuming, and from the things I'm reading, speakers for playing music and a voice that carps at you for eating the wrong foods.

There are some things that puzzle me about it.  There are quite a lot of foods that I don't keep in a refridgerator, like flour, sugar, beans, canned items and so on ... and these things get added to the refridgerator after they're cooked together into meals that I make without measuring, because after decades of working as a professional cook I eyeball everything, including most of the common baking I do.  So once I make a meal, out of substances both from and not from the refridgerator, then put them in the refridgerator as left-overs, I'm curious how I scan those left-overs in.  Or, for that matter, if I cut seven slices of cheese off a block, and return the slightly smaller block to the refridgerator, does the refridgerator weigh the cheese?  Or any of the other things I shave down as I'm cooking?  I don't buy pre-packaged foods ... and I'm definitely wondering how I scan out one potato.  Oh well.  There's probably some way it manages this.

If this is the amount of niggling micromanagement we're willing to install into our daily food-consuming activities, some five or six times a day, why would anyone care about having to roll 40 dice to account for equipment decay?

Is it that my readers, and their players, don't know how to speed up the die-rolling process?

I imagine a player with forty items rolling a die, getting a decay result, putting down the die, picking put an eraser, scratching out the "n" next to the character sheet, picking up a pencil, writing in a "u," putting down the pencil, picking up the die, rolling a decay result, putting down the die ...

Are your players really like this?  Homer postulated six seconds per roll.  Mon dieu!

Suppose that it was determined that, out of 60 pieces of equipment, 22 were new.  Some of those wouldn't need to roll at all; if the characters take the effort to pack all the extra uncommonly used articles in a single backpack that doesn't get opened or adjusted, then only the backpack need make a check.  Thoughtful storage would reduce wear and tear.  But let's say, I have 22 items to roll, and I have to use a d4.

First, I can simply roll the dice quickly, in batches of six, noting out loud, "fine, fine, down, fine, down, fine" ~ down meaning an item is downgraded.  Then I make a quick check on my character sheet on the 3rd and 5th item, and begin rolling again.  This way, I can easily do six rolls in six seconds.

Obviously, I'm not using a dice tower.  Dice towers are game momentum killers.  If you're at all interested in the pace of your game, make your players get rid of them.  They're only a way for the player to glom more attention to themselves as they fetishize their die rolls, making others wait and creating unneeded noise at the table.  But what am I saying?  Most of you have already figured this out.

I can speed the process still faster by having my neighbor roll dice, calling off the twenty-two items as I make ticks on my character sheet.  Or, I can roll the dice and my neighbor can make the ticks.  Unless, of course, both you and your neighbor are such profoundly distrustful prats that you can't trust one another to be both honest and faithful ... in which case, why the fuck are you playing with this person, much less sitting next to them?

With the two-person method, I can make 22 rolls in twenty seconds, and probably less.  The checks, once made, don't even need to be addressed during the game session.  The character sheet can be adjusted later, when we're not playing.  Or does that make too much sense?

I'm more than a little astounded that this doesn't seem obvious.  With five minutes and a little sense, with me rolling the dice and the players making ticks on their paper, I could manage five players' equipment.  They would trust my dice, because they trust me, and I would trust them to give the correct number of things that needed a check and to apply the checks to the rolls that hurt worst of all.  I know I could trust my players to do this, because if a player is the sort that won't, it will soon become obvious not only to me, but to every other player I have.  Before I settle in to address the issue, I will probably have two other players separately come to me and say, "You know, I saw Jack doing ..."  These are the kind of players I have.  They don't want to cheat.  They like playing fair.

It must be hard having so little mastery over your game, or the fundamental mechanics of your game, like dice rolling, that you have to make concessions so often for the sake of players who perceive that checks are egregious.  I had been thinking the decay system was a bridge too far, but in retrospect I'm seeing that I've created something rather simplistically elegant.

I refuse to hold myself to a standard of "time saving" with people who will drive all over town for hours on a Saturday to find just the right household towel, between 6-hour sessions playing fortnite and a four-hour football game, but won't sit for five minutes and roll 60 dice.  Fooey!

7 comments:

  1. To be fair, the fascination with newness is itself new, borne of the plenty industrialization has brought us. You didn't get people in 1400 lining up outside the armourer's shop to be the first to touch this year's breastplate model.

    Our ancestors in the medieval era were very thrifty, and indeed generally would not buy something new if they could avoid it (by buying used, doing without, repurposing, fixing, mending, etc.).

    Reading inventories and wills, people 600 years ago had few possessions by our standards, and those they had were often old. People hung onto used items - even rich people.

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  2. Could be, Charles ... and when the players who sit at my game table turn out to have been born 600 years ago, I will run my game in a way that will suit them.

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  3. As a mid- to high-level adventurer, you best believe every time I return to home base, I'm going to shell out all the gold just to have all new outfits. Gotta make a good impression when I'm at court.

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  4. Also don't forget you're not comparing serfs to middle class folks.
    You're comparing nobles to middle class folks.

    Players literally start with more wealth than the average peasant.

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  5. Always glad to serve as fuel for a post.

    A few things:

    (1) The storage rules require clarification. You write in the initial post that items degrade through use, such as taking them out of and putting them into containers, to explain why everything decays. You now write that items in a backpack do not roll for decay. The two are mutually incompatible. We can rationalize either system.

    (2) Players probably should be told the average life expectancy for each state of decay, so that they can meaningfully compare items. I posted the numbers previously. I ran the numbers to have a meaningful way to compare items in different states of decay, because the system doesn't provide a way to do so.

    In actuality, we can handle two otherwise-identical shovels and decide that one is basically sound, and the other is rusted-through and will probably break before we leave the market. At the tabletop this is obviously impossible. Qualitative labels like "used" and "shabby" don't provide meaningful information -- we can't tell how much better or worse a "shabby" shovel is relative to a "used" shovel. If we have infinite time, we can research how to describe the thousands of things a player might buy in each of their five possible states of decay. But us ordinary folk only get 24 hours in a day, and while I would love to read about the ways in which a wagon's various bits degrade, I just don't have the bloody time.

    Mechanically, when comparing two shovels of different decay, the player is comparing life expectancy.Decay state only affects an item's lifespan. It doesn't affect anything else. A worn shovel digs holes just like a shabby shovel; it merely should take longer to break. So we really want to know the expected lifespan at each state of decay.

    But your system doesn't provide life expectancy up front. We know a used item has a 1d20 chance to decay; but this isn't its life expectancy. Neither is [1d20 & 1d12 & 1d8]; this is its chance to break over three successive days. Calculating average life expectancy at a particular decay state gives us a way to compare items in a human-readable way. It's much more useful to tell the player that the "shabby" shovel she's thinking of buying won't last more than five days in a dungeon, give or take four in either direction, than to tell her that she'll be rolling 1d20, then 1d12, then 1d8 every day to see if the rather nicer "used" shovel breaks.

    (3) Imagine how little a player with infinite at-will healing cares about hitpoints, and how that affects the combat system.

    Obviously players have different motivations, and so will weigh cost-effectiveness differently. But the decay system is only relevant when players have finite money and must consider whether it makes sense to pay an extra X for an item which will probably last for additional Y days. If money is no issue, then tracking decay is pure busywork, because players can buy all-new equipment and the means of carrying it in bulk to wherever it's not for sale. If a player can, and you write in your campaign does, replace used items at-will with new ones, then you might as well tax him 10% of his income as maintenance and skip all the rolls, because there's no reason for him to worry about decay. He can just buy a bunch of new stuff and the mules to carry it.

    Certainly a player can still act out buying new items, or miserly hoarding items until they break, even if an item's longevity is irrelevant. The process just becomes as meaningless as turning every shopping trip into thirty minutes of bad improv.

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  6. Homer,

    You make so many assumptions based on your philosophy about role-playing games, it is difficult to address a post this long.

    1) Life expectancy is an unknown quality. Players cannot, and should not, be given information about the future. In fact, your various arguments about life expectancy are superfluous. In a game world without manufacturing standards, where guilds will sell defective articles to persons without remorse or expectation of consequence, especially to foreigners and persons who are not residents, there's no reason why a particular new article shouldn't break in three days.

    2) I consider your handling of shovels metaphor specious. I do not believe that "anyone" can handle two APPARENTLY identical shovels and tell anything. Moreover, again, in a medieval game world, there is no such thing as two "identical" shovels.

    3) Items in backpacks roll decay because backpacks notoriously contain items that are unpacked each night and repacked each morning. This leaves plenty of opportunity for additional items in these backpacks to get broken or ruined. Any long-time camper can confirm this. Moreover, packs are soft and are often what persons land on when they slip, bang against trees, are regularly dropped in combat, etc. You're not thinking large enough in your assumptions. An iron box is not a backpack.

    4) "used" and "shabby" provide EXACTLY as much needed game information as "1-6 damage," "hit points," "experience," "level," etc. You're being ridiculous.

    5) Your argument that it is much more "useful" to tell the player about the shabby shovel causes me to ask, why do you think the point of the game rule is its "usefulness." In any case, your argument presumes a knowledge of the future, which as a DM I won't give you. And I frankly don't care if your lack of knowledge about the future is "useful" or not. Sucks not to know what's going to happen for certain.

    6) The fact that the system does not provide an immediately obvious cost-effectiveness for the player is not a bug, it's a feature.

    7) If money is no issue, yes, the value of mundane things often becomes unnecessary and even annoying. You're absolutely right. He can just buy a bunch of new stuff and the mules to carry it. Where's the problem? Again, this is not a bug, this is a feature.

    8) I see no reason why I should tax players with money just because they have money. Nor do I see any reason why the possession of money, basically the overcoming and solution of the decay problem, is something that the player should be punished for. In no way is the decay rule designed to steal money from players for any reason. It is simply an obstacle that ALL persons, regardless of how much money they have, must deal with.

    9) What a player does, whether they are "acting out" or "miserly hoarding," is irrelevant to me.

    10) Meaningless to whom? You mean, it is something that annoys you and which you'd rather not play, for "reasons"?




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  7. Let me add, Homer, that you've been writing a series of comments lately that seem deliberately angled to quibble. I've been considering these to "ride the line," but I'm pretty much bored of this. If you don't like the rule, don't use it. But if you can't produce sounder arguments than this, leave off and go find another blog to read.

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