Consider changing the size progression for Mighty and Weak

[irilyth]

The current size progression for Mighty and Weak is [1 2 4 6 8 10 12 20 30]. This has a lot of steps, but the early ones are very close together, and there's only one higher than 20.

I think it'd be more fun if the steps were farther apart, and if there were more on the high end, so that over the course of a game, dice were more likely to change sizes more times and more dramatically.

Two proposals:

(1) Non-standard sizes: [1 2 4 7 11 16 22 29 37 46] This has a linear progression of jumps between sizes, and includes four sizes over 20, giving H20s plenty of fun things to do. It's a big change from the current behavior, and might confuse people who aren't expecting it.

(2) Standard sizes: [1 2 4 8 12 16 20 30 40] This gets rid of 6 and 10, to make the low-end changes more dramatic, and adds 16 and 40 so that there's more room to move on the high end. It's not as interesting as the non-standard size progression, but it's perhaps less confusing and weird for newcomers.

I like (1) better than (1), but like (2) better than doing nothing. Anyone else have an opinion?

[yawetag]

​So there's no documentation on what sizes are supposed to be used?

[irilyth]

277 and #279 have the texts from the help pages on the old site. We ended up dropping 16-siders from that list (I'd forgotten this until just now), because we thought at the time that the Mighty/Weak progressions should match the Mood Swing options, but we've since changed our minds about that principle.

[ManvilleFog]

IIRC both of these were suggested before and the decision was made in favor of what is currently in use. Isn't this part of a closed issue?

[irilyth]

I don't think "the decision was made", I think I made a proposal and no one replied.

We didn't want to hold up the release of the skills, so we closed the ticket that was blocking that, with an explicit comment that we could talk elsewhere about changing the progressions if we want.

Do you actually have an opinion?

[cgolubi1]

I have to admit that my mental model of how buttonmen works is that Mighty dice top out at 30. I'm sure if we switched to something else, i'd get used to it, but i'm not very curious about what would happen if Loki were even more powerful, so i'm mildly in favor of leaving things as they are.

I don't have a strong opinion at all about the smaller sizes, other than that i think they should be fairly regular (some subset of 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20), because people may want to plan around being able to remember what their die will do next, and it's a pain to have to mouse over the skill description every time rather than having some intuition about what will happen. (And i think it'll be harder to remember a strange progression.) Anyway, with all those caveats, if people want to change the lower progression, i might sign onto some such plan.

But i like the current way better than either (1) or (2), which is the primary reason i haven't weighed in.

[irilyth]

Weighing in to say that you don't like either proposal is still useful. :^)

I don't think Loki is likely to see 40-siders -- that'd be a game in which Loki got seven turns, which isn't very likely (and if it does happen, Loki has probably already won anyway. They're more for buttons like The Tick. Maybe there aren't many buttons like The Tick, but I feel there are a couple of buttons with Mighty dice that routinely max out at 30.

One other suggestion: Keeping the same progression as the old site might have some merit, especially for buttons that were designed for the old site, so that they don't become weaker or more powerful as a result. I'm not sure how compelling that is, but it might be a point in favor of adding 16 back in.

[cgolubi1]

I said Loki, but i meant The Tick. Lack of coffee is impeding my ability to be a curmudgeon on the internet.

[ManvilleFog]

After joining a game with the Tick I can see why you want more dice above the twenty-sider. An H20 seems almost pointless, but the Tick isn't known for his intelligence. He's known for his nigh-invulnerability and opposite of intelligence. And thinking about this some more, it makes sense in relationship to the character. He's always buff, but he uses a bit more might after he's warmed up to a fight. To gain much more might would be more of a Hulk thing.

Anyhow, sorry for not being specific, but in general I'm against any major changes from previous stated rules. Some are relatively vague and need discussion and have more flexibility rules-wise. Mighty and Weak don't seem to be in that category. IMO the only thing that needed clarity was what to do at the high end of the skill - an H99 doesn't become an 30-sider when rerolled, and an h31 goes down to a 30-sider. I'm not really happy with the removal of the 16-sider, but I think the reason for the change makes a lot of sense. I don't see that with other proposed changes to Mighty and Weak progression.

---

Hopefully I'm not crossing a line with this statement. I feel it's valid and important: I think a very important thing to keep in mind here is that this project isn't creating a game; it's creating an emulation of an already existing game. The job here isn't to make or change the rules of the game and decide whether or not they're fun and balanced - hopefully the designers have already done so. The job is to make sure we gain a thorough understanding of the game and make the game available to online players. The part of this being invented is the visualization of the gaming table, the controls used to play the game, and the environment in which the players can interact with each other.

[irilyth]

Huh. Two things:

(1) The 16-sider apparently wasn't removed:

irilyth performed Power attack using [H(12):8] against [(10):3]; Defender (10) was captured; Attacker H(12) changed size from 12 to 16 sides, recipe changed from H(12) to H(16), rerolled 8 => 6

So that's sort of unexpected, but seems good.

(2) I definitely agree that your not-crossing-a-line statement is important, I just disagree. :^) I think we're not just trying to make a perfect copy of an existing game; at the very least, we're expanding and enhancing the game. Such as, by adding die skills like Mighty and Weak, which aren't part of the official game, and only exist because the old site's PTB decided that it was fine to expand and ehance the game in the first place. I have some faith in the original designers' sense of game balance, but it's obviously not perfect; and certainly the stuff that our predecessors (who are in some cases us ourselves :^) added to the old site aren't likely to be so well-tested that they couldn't possibly be improved.

I think that's an important philosophical disagreement, and it's probably fine for us to disagree -- I think it's useful to have some voices for change, and some voices for preservation, and a good balance can emerge from that.

[ManvilleFog]

Yes, I understand that many of the buttons and skills were created by the old site, but that doesn't make them less a part of the game. In fact, when finding errors in recipes used on the old site I was asked not to get rid of the incorrect recipes. This is because the recipes used by the old site had become part of the game and some people enjoyed playing them as they were.

I think it needs to be said we didn't leave the errors uncorrected We now have two version of these buttons.

[irilyth]

I think there are still some interesting philosophical issues to talk about somewhere, which came up on this ticket -- in particular I see some tension between wanting to be faithful to the original game, wanting to include things that were not part of the original game but were added on the old site, and wanting to feel free to add things on this new site. And, I suppose, a somewhat different thing: What to do about things that the old site changed (not just added), and whether the new site should only add new things, and never change old things, or if it's sometimes ok to change old things, if they make the game better (which gets back to the faithfulness question).

I sort of don't think this ticket is the right place for those, but I'm not sure where is. Maybe a forum on the site? It's not really a technical issue, and possibly not an issue that only devs should see/discuss.

For this ticket, I think the only remaining question was about 16-siders; since both the current docs and the current implementation includes them, and the only people to express opinions wanted to include them, I think there's not actually anything else to do here, so I'll close this one out.