Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Proposal: Feeling His Presence

Times out and fails, 1-3. -Bucky

Adminned at 29 Dec 2014 17:05:57 UTC

In the rule “Containers”, replace “The Traffic Warden may, as a daily action, choose a moon and add a Container to up to two random Orbits around it, each with up to 3 Fuel, 3 Sulfur, 3 Ice or 10 Iron in its Storage.” with:-

No more than twice per day, the Traffic Warden may select a Moon at random and add a Container to a random Orbit around it, its Storage containing DICE3 units of a randomly selected Substance from those currently listed in the ruleset (tripling that amount if the Substance is Iron).

Making Containers generically autogenerating and removing the dungeon-master decision aspect.

posted by Kevan at 23 Dec 2014 20:25:00 UTC Comments (7)

Comments

Bucky:

23-12-2014 20:57:21 UTC

against
Issues:
*Wastes my time generating containers in Callisto orbit (which also makes Terraform Callisto’s substance requirement pointless if it ever comes up)
*Does not actually auto-generate like the commentary claims
*While I’ve been randomly selecting Substances anyway, I’m not convinced the Dungeon Master aspect is bad.
*I actually think DICE3 is too much variance and have been using a constant 2/6 instead.  2DICE4-1 might be a good compromise, if you feel it should be more random.

Sylphrena:

23-12-2014 21:32:46 UTC

Bucky: Can you explain in more detail how you are getting your random values or how we could use 2DICE4-1 to get values?  against because I don’t think the issue this is fixing is a problem.

Bucky:

23-12-2014 23:22:26 UTC

My typical procedure for generating containers:
1) Decide to generate two containers.
2) Decide what moon to add them to arbitrarily, but keeping each moon within 2 generated containers of each other.  I will probably break this when Io has 6 unclaimed containers, skipping it until someone collects some of them.
3) Roll the orbit to dispense a container in, and a DICE4 to choose the substance (generally 1:Fuel, 2: Iron, 3: Ice, 4: Sulfur although I haven’t been entirely consistent)
4) Choose a quantity of 6 for Iron and 2 for everything else (although I have rolled random quantities twice)

ayesdeeef:

24-12-2014 00:13:51 UTC

against Much the same as Bucky and Sylphrena. Why is DM a bad idea in this instance? I don’t think it’s an inherently repulsive trait of the current system because it allows for thoughtful generation of a Gamestate that is conducive to gameplay as Bucky said with the Io example.

Kevan: he/him

24-12-2014 12:11:21 UTC

It’s just the unpredictability. If a player knows that Containers are entering the game randomly (or by some keep-it-interesting heuristic as Bucky outlines above) they can work that into their plans and decide what to do next. If Containers are being placed at the whim of opponents then the player can assume they’ll always be dropped in the worst possible places and work that into their plans.

But a neutral dungeon master is unreadable - if some of us fall behind and desperately need Iron to catch up, are they going to help us out by spawning Iron, or let us fail? If Player X just needs one more Ice to win, is the DM going to help them up or hold them back? If such intentions are there, or if they’re not, I’d rather we all knew about it beforehand.

Bucky:

26-12-2014 03:14:35 UTC

Okay, you know my intentions now.

Kevan: he/him

29-12-2014 00:37:56 UTC

To a point - we know your “typical procedure” but don’t know how you’ll react to idiosyncratic situations. Ayesdeeef seems to think you’ll do things which are “conducive to gameplay”, I’m not sure what to expect.