Starting this post by quoting the relevant bits from posts by Nic, Mei, and Dass, because my reply will touch on all of them.
* Establish Skill Threshold Restrictions. As was commented during the event, skill group allocations like Savant and Specialist seemingly gave players an overly good chance of success with certain abilities. It may be worth looking into restricting allocation selection to certain groups or establishing new ones for space RP.
I can agree with this too. For me, my space battle guy IS one of my in-game RPers, so I didn't actually create a specific skill sheet for space combat. Perhaps, there would be some sort of altered form of the character sheet specific to space combat? I don't know, I'm just throwing that out there.
While I was initially worried about the balance of things, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself nodding along with it by the end. Despite having two savants on the Republic side of things, creative thinking on the Imperial side and few good rolls kept things bopping until the end. The race to take out that transport was just that—a race. So, while I don't have much to add, my final two cents are that it is, in my opinion, more balanced than first meets the eye. Also, it's nice and light and quick—something events sometimes desperately need.
(I would love to hear input from
@LVT too, because they are great with the numbers and I know they brought this up during the event.)
This sort of feedback is critical. Other feedback like it led me to refining lots of the skills and allocation arrays of the core system. I'm open to considering unique changes that might need to be made specific to the space combat system, but first I want to play Devil's Advocate because I find that can often help to distill a discussion down to its most relevant points. My Devil's Advocate position would be this:
It could be argued that the Savant array in the hands of a starfighter pilot engaged in a space battle is no more or less powerful/unbalanced than the Savant array in the hands of a lightsaber-wielder (or Force-wielder) engaged in ground combat. A score of 90 or 100 in a skill means you are almost always going to succeed, and if that skill is combat-related, and you are
in combat, then you are almost always going to succeed. If near-guaranteed success is unbalanced in one type of combat, it could be argued that it is unbalanced in
all types of combat, and therefore the Savant and Specialist arrays ought to be removed entirely.
In the event that you are looking at a battle where all participants have a near-guaranteed success rate on combat skills, then as the system currently stands all that ultimately means is that people are going to be whittled down
faster, because there will be almost no missed/failed attacks. Arguably, given how long chat room events go, that's not even necessarily a
bad thing.
What that scenario does also create, however, is a lack of the "possibility of failure" that often works to create good drama and story. If looked at as a strict numbers trade-off (setting aside enjoyment factor), it might therefore be argued that eliminating high-powered arrays in order to ensure possibility of failure comes directly at the cost of longer event time.
So, that's the core Devil's Advocate argument I would present. My own feelings at the moment happen to jive with some of it, but I'll elaborate more, and look forward to any discussion that might help me refine things.
I feel that the Savant and Specialist arrays do not cause any problems, in either space combat or ground combat,
provided the GM has the opportunity to know what they're dealing with in advance in order to tailor the opposition accordingly.
The way I see it, if a player has looked at the system and made their character a Savant in a specific area, it's because the character concept they
want to play is one who is
exceptional at a particular skill. If they happen to be specialized at a skill/area that is being highlighted in any given event, well, then it's just that player's turn to shine. (If they happen to never sign up with that character for any events
other than the ones in which they specialize, then that's just their prerogative. I am likely to think that they are missing out on the opportunities and fun to be had in letting your player feel out of their depth sometimes, but it's not for me to dictate what fantasies people want to engage in. Or maybe they just have a very large stable of characters they want to play with and only bring certain characters out occasionally, when an event feels particularly well suited.)
I feel that it is my job as the GM of a rules-oriented event to balance the NPCs against the players. If the players are giving me three Savants, then I am either going to create a couple Savant NPCs to oppose them (if the goal of a combat is to make an even fight), or a couple normal-powered NPC bosses with just an exceptionally large hit point pool to make them last, or maybe instead I will create a
swarm of less-powered NPCs to oppose them so that the heroes are being whittled down by bee-stings as the fight progresses.
Now, on the other hand, if you're looking at an event that is more PVP themed, then yes I do agree that the Savant and Specialist arrays become a much more unbalancing factor. But I'm not necessarily convinced (yet) that eliminating those arrays as options is the answer, but I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss and hear more arguments.
For one thing, that could create the annoyance of players having to create multiple character sheet variations for the same character, depending on the event (or even depending on the scenario within the
same event if a story moves from ground to air), and I can't imagine that's going to make people too happy either (in addition to causing logistical headache for the GM).
I think part of this question is about an intersection between two approaches: a RP approach, and a game-balance approach. If it becomes a question of which aspect gets more weight, then for online RP I personally am likely give the greater weight to the
RP, entirely because we do not have a comprehensive system of rules like you would in a pen and paper RPG (where the rules books are hundreds of pages long), nor do we have a game engine and myriad abilities coded to specific numbers. If someone wants to be bring a character with a Vehicles threshold of 70 to a space battle (because maybe what they're really a badass at is lightsabers), it shouldn't come as a surprise to them that someone else's
hotshot space ace might be coming to the space battle with a Vehicles threshold of 90. Both characters are totally valid
as characters, and it's the RP is that needs to fill the gap.
That's just one approach, though, and not necessarily the best one. But I do think, as stated, that it only becomes a more troublesome issue when you're looking at player versus player, as opposed to player versus GM-created-world. And this actually leads really well into Sebrik's feedback:
I have some issues with this system that force me to shy away from any event that uses it.
My first issue is no defensive rolls. Getting automatically hit makes no sense to me during PvP. As I understood last night, you said one could devote their turn to an evade, to negate damage of the next attack. But how does that work when someone before you attacks you? The advantage goes to whoever is first in the turn order. Player 1 attacks Player 2, Player 2 expects to be able to defend himself.
So, in the core rules post for the system, I presented opposed checks in player versus player scenarios as an optional rules set only, to be used at GM discretion; as a default, there are no opposed checks at all in combat.
I openly admit that in the guidance I was giving Nicohlas for this event (which was also the first play test of the starship rules module) I did not propose using the optional opposed checks rules.
The reason for this is the same reason that the core system does not incorporate opposed checks for normal combat, which, as stated in the core rules post, is: "Almost all combat in the Under 100 system is executed by the player making a single
unopposed check to determine the success or failure of their attempted combat action.
This is designed to keep combat moving swiftly. As with all other skills, combat rolls are meant to represent a character's own proficiency; if they are a very good sharpshooter, they are simply more frequently going to land their shots."
I bolded the bit that is most relevant to the why. A chat room event can sometimes take
forever. Between the time people take to craft the writing around their character's actions, the time everyone else has to wait in order for them to
do that, and the fact that in turn-based RP you
have to wait (as opposed to just continuing to chatter socially at your whim no matter if the person at the other end of the table is taking their time), what you end up with is that combat resolution can take hours all on its own even in the best of circumstances.
When the enemy you are attacking has the option to make an opposing roll that might negate your attack, then you are going to end up seeing attacks fail 50% (to take just the straight median possibility) of the time. What that instantly means is that you have now tacked on 50% more
time to the duration of the event, because it is going to take 50% longer to actually whittle that enemy down to defeat.
In looking at the system, my hope was that the balancing factor to removing opposed checks would be that they are removed for
everyone, PC and NPC alike. So while a PC isn't going to be able to oppose a NPC's attack, neither will the NPC be able to do so. And since the majority of NPCs in the system are Mooks and Champions who are likely to have significantly lower combat stats than the player characters, that means that in actuality, even without the option for opposed checks, the entire system is still weighted heavily in the player characters' favor.
Now, coming back specifically to
player versus player, I do acknowledge that this might not always feel as epic as we'd like it to feel. That is why I
did include opposed checks as an
optional rule for pvp scenarios, but again if someone needs to be blamed for how last night's event went then the blame goes to me, for not advocating with Nic for using that optional rules set.
As it stands, the event Nic hosted took almost three hours, for the resolution of one single space battle with a total of five participants making unopposed rolls. And PVP or not, I think incorporating opposed checks would have guaranteed it went much longer than that.
However, length of time is obviously just
my concern, coming at it primarily from a GM perspective, and why I built the rules the way I did. I fully acknowledge that everyone goes into an event with different concerns and perspectives, and wanting to get different experiences out of it. So probably what would ultimately be most fair would be for an event organizer to announce in their event thread whether or not they intend to be using opposed checks for PVP or not, to then let people choose whether or not they want to engage with an event under those conditions.
But how does that work when someone before you attacks you? The advantage goes to whoever is first in the turn order.
Quoting this bit again because I think it can be carved out as a separate feedback item for discussion.
Fundamentally, you're right: advantage goes to whoever is first in the turn order. In a system with no opposed checks, that is indisputable. Who gets that advantage, in that case, depends entirely on the random chance of the initiative order roll.
Currently, there is no way to give you an improved chance at doing better on your initiative roll; it's fully random. It is in fact the only fully random rolling element in the Under 100 system, and that's because I specifically
did not like the random nature of "straight" rolls in which you just had a 50/50 chance of succeeding no matter how good your character was supposed to be at something. But when it came to determining initiative, I didn't want to encumber the system with a whole skill group devoted to nothing but initiative, because fewer numbers to juggle is better.
I'm definitely open to suggestions about how initiative checks could be made less random without bogging the system down with more skills.
Tying it to a skill group at all adds more complications anyway, because the skill thresholds are meant to determine success/failure, but you don't
fail at an initiative check, which is just meant to rank people in a numerical order.
I'd be totally up for adding an additional use of Heroic Moment points, though: using a HM point during the initiative rolling phase to grant you 1st place initiative, maybe? (Although then you run into possible complications if more than one person wants to do that at the same time.)
Anyone have thoughts?
(Sebrik also had some great feedback on starship stats which I want to get into in a separate post, to really chew on it properly.)
