To satisfy my curiousty, what exactly WERE the odds, percentage wise in the final bout, about who would win?
I'm not sure what the exact odds were but I don't think there was one time in all three turns that the actions or rolls ended up the way I expected, so when I expected you to win I probably hexed you.
Like he obviously beat me on a strength roll, twice to disarm and resist my attempt to throw him off. He beat me on a dex roll to jump over my sword, and possibly an intelligence roll for me to not see it coming?
There were quite a few times during the bout that I thought I should have done things differently so I tried to play this one by the new rules for the most part to try and give my actions a bit more justification. A major problem was that the new rules depend a lot on space and time measurements that would need to have been in place at the start of the match to work right, so I ended up compromising with a couple of assumptions like your sword was designed for a range greater than unarmed which under the new rules would mean that you were at a disadvantage if your opponent got into unarmed range. Something which I had also intended from the start of the first bout but didn't make clear was that the combatants would have little or no combat experience, with their weapon skills probably coming from less than an hour of training between selecting it and entering the battlefield which is also why I did an Intelligence roll for almost every attack - because they wouldn't have the experience to know how much the weapon increased their reach by in a battle-effective manner, plus they would be stressed out by fighting to the death (part of the reason for Ligith's crying at the end) so their effective use of their senses would be further reduced.
From the start of the last turn I looked at both Orange and Ligith's orders and figured that the appropriate mindset was to finish it that turn, so I was going to ignore the rule implying that each turn was about three seconds unless something extraordinary happened.
Ligith ended the previous turn by jumping backwards out of your sword range (I was expecting you to score a hit but Ligith was too lucky - it scored 140 in a Dexterity check and Orange couldn't have beaten that) so I figured it was about two sword-lengths and interpreted your order as meaning you wanted to slash Ligith's legs from within your weapon's range so I had you start closing the distance. Then Ligith also started charging and I interpreted your 'be wary of any tackling attempt' as a form of preparation and gave Orange an auto-success at thinking which caused it to stop charging, otherwise the distance would close too quickly and Ligith would be closer than your weapon's optimum range. This also meant that when Orange dropped down to slash Ligith's legs, it didn't get a penalty due to moving at the same time like Ligith did. In spite of the penalty Ligith managed to jump the blade anyway (I assumed Orange was slashing at its calfs, though a thigh-high slash could still be jumpable) and collided with Orange because of momentum. I figured that Orange was probably a bit off-balance due to dropping down quickly but it wouldn't have made much difference when Ligith had its momentum. Ligith ending up on top seemed more reasonable than having it bounce off and I figured that since it had been deliberately aiming to get in your face (and I didn't think of Orange as being below Ligith's jump height) an overshoot was unreasonable so it ended up on top without having to make a roll. When Ligith was going to make a grab for the sword I figured it would let go of the sand it was holding to grab for the sword with both hands so I gave it an Intelligence roll to drop the sand in Orange's eyes in the process but it flunked so it didn't. Being on the bottom and having taken the force of your landing and some of Ligith's should have gotten you a penalty but I didn't work that out until later and since Ligith got lucky and ended the match anyway I decided not to edit it in.
With luck like that, I would of failed no matter what strategy I used, correct?
Probably. Part of the reason I started on the new rules was to make a good strategy better than good luck. Also because I had concerns that the stats weren't balanced (I still do but it's being worked on) with Strength seeming underused (which ironically was used to decide the match) though that might just have been because of a lack of direct clashes.
What use did intelligence actually have here, or would I have been better off stacking dex like him? Or should A player who has alot of intelligence, plan more complicated strategy?
The idea was for each stat to play a part but things didn't go as planned. When I first saw that Ligith had only 10 points in Strength and Intelligence I figured they would lose in short order, then when they lucked an Intelligence roll to perform a counter-attack but messed up the execution and lost their whip I thought again that they would lose within the next turn but the character's interactions ended up allowing Ligith to use it's Dexterity each time it came close to death.
I used Intelligence as a combination of perception (which influenced weapon aiming) and the ability to notice changes in circumstances and plan new tactics accordingly (in the first turn, Ligith thought to change from defence to offence independent of the player's orders because it saw an opportunity thanks to an Intelligence roll, which was a good plan with poor execution. Looking over my notes, Orange also used an Intelligence roll in the first turn to try and figure out how to kill Ligith when it just kept on backing away. Once again the execution went awry).In theory this means that a character with higher Intelligence would disregard poor orders and take a better course of action though it might fall down on the implementation of those actions. The definition of 'a better course of action' is one that I determine mid-turn, so the AI for this bout could have been thought of as 'overriding stupidity' since it almost never worked out favourably.
I would question the need for an intelligence stat, actually. It seems like it is mostly used for...anything really the GM decides. Which means annoying players will question "why not this, why not that" etc.
Some of the new rules are aimed at setting guidelines for the AI in a way that a player can take advantage of by making sure that they can explicity prevent the AI from doing some things like that misfortuned counter-attack by Ligith in the first turn, although I'm hoping some of the other rules will prevent some of the more frustrating failures. This also means that something is less likely to go wrong just because I wasn't in the right frame of mind at the time. That's a lot of the reason that the new rules are relatively rigid, so that what happens has checks in place to keep quality consistent. If something seems unnecessary bear in mind that so far there have been very little in the way of rules and balancing. It occurred to me that the number of rules and regulations being implemented might be out of place in a RTD, which is part of the reason that I suggested moving this to another forum.
And, I am not complaining, I just want to know,
I would understand if you did complain, seeing as alot of the workings aren't where you can see them. I've been thinking I should review the rules to make sure people don't feel too intimidated to bring up any issues they might have, which is not the idea behind bout 1 rule 8. A game isn't much good without satisfied players after all, it's just that because I haven't had any 'hard and fast' rules that I've felt were consistent I haven't been inclined to show them.
as I would not mind making another character when everything is fleshed out.
Glad to hear it, although it could be a while. I actually started working on an example bout today and I've already come across a couple of issues:
- The TU cost for Move that got posted is incomplete - Moving 100 SUs at 100% Intensity is supposed to take 100 TUs, not 1! I consider this a game breaker.
- In the 'clash calcs' section, the formula for working out the TU penalty is missing.
- Some of the calculations take even longer than I expected - something like half an hour without finishing one clash, so I might try and write a program to speed things up a bit.
As a result I'm going to be using the example bouts as a debugging tool and re-post the rules once I'm done. Considering how long it took me to come up with the flawed version the only commitment I'm willing to make is to mention progress about once a week. Since I seem to have a poor track record of predicting player behaviour I might post bits and pieces for people to put through a stress test before completion to try and improve the end result (that part in bout 1 where Ligith scooped up some sand... before that I hadn't consciously thought about the floor ).
If there are people who are interested in this 'beta testing' phase, I would like it if you let me know by post or PM. Also feel free to give suggestions, though this set of rules is likely to be more of a bugfix for the existing ones than one with additional features (eg I expect it to be somewhat 'vanilla' with its lack of proper unarmed combat) but after the doubts I had during the first match I'd rather have a solid foundation first.
Anyway, this seems like a nice experiment. Good luck turning it into a working game!
Thanks. I felt a glow of satisfaction when bout 1 ended and hope to feel it again when I've got a solid system in place. The challenge is not to exhaust myself by deferring bed every night!
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Topic: End of the Road Arena - CRS 1.1 (work still in progress as of 25 June 2010) (Read 5027 times)