"I'm happy to have another conversation about Prediction. Here are my objectives.

1) Astrology should be useful. Shock, horror.
2) Prediction should be useful. Gibbering madness.
3) However, Prediction should keep... an edge to it. Prediction is a direct connection from your character's brain to a level of reality that can be cheerfully called Lovecraftian. It's as big as galaxies and the only break from cosmic apathy is the occasional fit of malevolence.
4) Particularly dramatic or precise manifestations should be conceived as Teleologic Sorcery rather than a Prediction ability."

I Appreciate this invitation to conversation and I hope you didn't feel it was ignored. I've taken the invitation seriously and taken some time to try and compose coherent thoughts on the subject.

I think I can best express, thematically, some of what I think would benefit the guild through a suggestion of an ability and a spell related to that ability.

It would also be useful to me, and I imagine others who are interested in putting together proposals, to have an informal summary of what the general theme and direction


Okay, so, suggestion time

Luck: Ability gained at 30th circle.

-Activating the ability "contests" every skill check performed by the mage or anyone grouped with them for a bonus to the effective ranks of that skill for particular action.

Example:

Player A slices at Goblin with a HE weapon. The luck ability performs an internal "check" to determine if it activates. if it does, the bonus is determined and applied to Player A's HE skill. The bonus is only good for that slice. The next attack will generate a new check.

(This is thematically consistent with the way the game depicts fate manipulation as skill bonuses)

-If the ability successfully activates the effective ranks in the skill being checked for that action are bonused

(Here is the balance portion. I have developed hostile feelings toward this guild's tendency to want to punish ourselves for having nice things. Some things require explosive downsides. Not everything does. The balance is that sometimes it simply isn't going to do anything at all)


-The bonus is a percentage range bounded from 0%-*% where *% is a (bounded) random number modified by an equation reflecting astrology. The bonus is kept within global caps.

(I waffled on the 0% bonus being part of the range after already having a check to see if the ability activates at all however, I think having the lower bounds of the bonus able to be fairly low allows for meaningful growth within the skill, and also allows wiggle room in the balancing of the skill rather than just relying on a binary check.)


-Duration of the ability feeds off of the moonmage's observation pool. Essentially deducting "a successful observation" per unit of time. observations added after the ability has been activated count, but an activation has a maximum duration that is a function of circle.

(I honestly have no idea if this is even possible, but after looking over the different guild abilities it seems standard design to have some sort of pool to draw from)


And accompanying spell suggestion.

Doom: Teleologic Sorcery

-A perversion of the luck ability that projects an aura of bad luck to anyone near the caster.

-Anything facing or engaged with the MM suffers a stat contest modified by astrology for every action taken (Most non OOC verbs. Wield weapon or go north would initiate a contest, exp would not)

-Failing the contest results in Stuns, falling, RT or a combination of the three depending on a sliding scale of success.


Well, this has gotten very long so I'm gonna stop here. If you read this far, thanks.


-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

"The Luck ability as you described is too much in control, and lacks any bite. It would be a normal ability if it lets say increased the chance to critically succeed and critically fail. You don't get to decide which one it does."

I have to disagree. Not every ability we have needs to have a chance of screwing us over. It's enough that the majority of the time the bonus, if it happens, would be low to moderate.

I want to stay away from GvG but an example would be that cleric Communes don't Bonus all offense OR tank them. They just bonus.

Blowing yourself up if you cast moongate at the wrong time is fine. You screwed up.

Getting screwed randomly by your abilities just for kicks isn't. It makes them undesirable to use, and therefor unused and pointless.


-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

Speaking from the peanut gallery here...

Nothing about the proposed "Luck" ability strikes me as inherently teleological from my understanding of it.

However I question how useful something like that would actually be -- particularly compared to current predictions. Would you REALLY want to wade into combat knowing your abilities are going to flux fairly significantly with every swing? Generally speaking increased variance in results is not something that tends to make a system popular.

>>Getting screwed randomly by your abilities just for kicks isn't. It makes them undesirable to use, and therefor unused and pointless.

Which is somewhat of the crux of the problem prediction has always had. If it's 100% reliable, it's absurdly overpowered (Even in it's current incarnation as opposed to what it was before the rewrite). However the fact that it isn't consistent and can sometimes go sour -- really sour -- is part of what has frequently made it an unpopular system.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if you want your predictions controllable you end up with CJs (which are their own giant can of worms) or Tangled Fate.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

I understand you're not looking to replace the current system, I was just using it for a comparison. What you're missing is this (Using made up numbers):

Current:
I have 200 evasion. I use predictions to change that by 50.

I now either have 250 evasion and can safely take that third critter, or move up to a harder critter, or I have 150 evasion and know it's time to go fold origami instead.

Most importantly I know the result of the prediction, so I know how to react to it.

Luck:
I have 200 evasion. I apply luck. I now have between 200 and 225 evasion on each swing.

If I get a third critter on me it'll miss me. Sometimes. It'll also hit me. Sometimes. I can't account for the variance, because I don't know what it will be until it's too late.

While you're not suffering a penalty, you're also unable to really take advantage of the boost, since you can't count on it.

I don't actually mean to be stomping on ideas here and would rather encourage brainstorming, so please take this in the spirit it is intended -- which is highlighting some of the difficulties in designing a system that is balanced, useful, and fits the prediction flavor.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

"If I get a third critter on me it'll miss me. Sometimes. It'll also hit me. Sometimes. I can't account for the variance, because I don't know what it will be until it's too late.

While you're not suffering a penalty, you're also unable to really take advantage of the boost, since you can't count on it."

While I see your point I think there is still use in it. The idea sort of has roots in die 20 games. Most of those games feature a critical success on a roll of 20. There are some weapons/abilities that will drop that number to include 19 or 18 as well. These weapons are highly valued because, over time, they raise your damage output. I might still roll a 1 on my damage dice, but the opportunity for an exceptional outcome is there.

Some examples of where I think it would be useful and used in dragonrealms are:

I've gone to fold oragami. My mechlore is such that the piece i'm working on is in the maybe range. On my normal skill I get a mix of success and failure. With luck, I skew toward more success. Subtle, but a net gain for me.

I've just moved into a new hunting area. They still get light hits on me now and then but it's manageable. Luck, over time, reduces the number of those hits I take.

Same situation moving into a new hunting area. I successfully hide half the time with my base ranks. The number of successful hides I accomplish, over time, goes up.

"I don't actually mean to be stomping on ideas here and would rather encourage brainstorming, so please take this in the spirit it is intended -- which is highlighting some of the difficulties in designing a system that is balanced, useful, and fits the prediction flavor."

I am most certainly not taking your responses as stepping on the suggestion at all. Even if you loved it there would still be a lot of things to be considered and questioned about it. I think the ability is a good idea but even more than that I am interested in a discussion about what direction we would like to take "fate" flavored abilities. I felt like some suggestions were the best way to start because complaining is easy, but it's a really hard concept to design for.

Also, the Doom suggestion should be implemented immediately :)




-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

<<d20 argument

"The issue with that is that DR already has a random element to its skillchecks. Applying a second random element on top of that just magnifies the potential upper range, which as noted isn't very practical."

I admit I am having trouble understanding what your issue is here. At first I thought you were arguing that skill buffs are not practical because they just magnify the potential upper range. But I can't see anyone truly arguing that. So what I understand you to be saying is "the proposed ability would only magnify the range of possible outcomes on the results table of a skill check"

If that is the case, no, it would not. It would buff the skill before the table of results was accessed.

At a specific skill value there is a range of possible outcomes. Taken to extreme for clarity of example; 900 ranks of HE will never wiff on a field goblin even with snake eyes. Also, with 900 evasion, that goblin will never hit you. This establishes that the "random" element of an applied skill check is instead a range of outcomes corresponding to a domain, it's not a one to one function but it IS bounded.

Secondly, this is irrelevant because skill buffs don't address the range of a contest directly, they adjust the domain. With a new point in the domain you gain a new range of possible outcomes. A skill buff will ALWAYS result in a domain point that corresponds to a range set that is more favorable to your character.

So the "random" element of the proposed idea has little to do with the upper range of a results table.

What it WOULD do is give the affected person an overall favorable skew to whatever tasks they might be repetitively engaged in (and since this is DR, that's everything.)

Here is another long winded example.

Luck activates 75% of the time
The rank bonus you get is over 50 ranks 25% of times luck activates(values picked for ease of math)

so out of 100 skill checks, 25 are your base ranks

75 of your skill checks are buffed to some degree

33 of your skill checks are significantly buffed.

So the net result for your character is improved results 75 out of 100 times, with vastly improved results 33 out of those 100 times.

Another way of saying it is 75% of the time you are operating with more skill than you actually have. 33% of the time you are operating with quite a bit more skill than you actually have. There is never a situation where this is bad.


"Luck would be better suited as an Unluck version of the spell instead imo, because then it would have a viable practical use, along with fitting into the theme of sorcery = violence in some form.""

I never suggested Luck as a sorcery, nor do I think it should be a spell. The idea was an activated ability, much like communes.

As a debuff luck would be horrible and impractical. If it were centered on the mage and not an individual cast per target then it would be sort of useful, but much more limited. It would be almost useless for PvP.

For a sorcery debuff of fate theme I suggested an ability I called Doom, but it was buried at the bottom of the wall of text I wrote. Maybe I should have lead with that.


-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

<<Unluck sorcery

Not sure how that would be horrible and impractical in PvP or otherwise. Cast it on the target and for the next 5 minutes, approx 50% of their attacks are made with 20% less skill. That could be a real life saver.

Once again, made up and oversimplified numbers.

-Evran

Gay, geeky, and a little bit cheeky.