[GZG] The Great Premeasuring Monkey Dance

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lRichard said:
"In FT, it is perfectly reasonable for a measurement to be taken from a
ship to anything on the table for each firecon mounted.......This makes
smaller ships chasing each other through asteroid swarms a bit
interesting--
do I trust my eyeballing,  or measure the distance to the object that I
hope
to fly by."

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Problem: Do unarmed civilian ships that lack fire control radar smack
into
asteroids? Wouldn't asteroid belt racers (or other fast civilian ships
that
don't NEED firecons) be able to see things anyway?

Sensors are a 'hidden' aspect of FT mostly (there are some sop rules,
but at
most on-table ranges inside weapons ranges, you can see everything) and
we
fly around at arbitrarily large speeds without fear of consequences, so
I
submit that the ship must already have good sensors.

Now, mechanically, if you want to limit pre-measuring, the method you
suggest tends to work. But it isn't based on anything particularly
limiting
in the ship designs because all ships must have at least reasonable
sensors.

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Allan:
"Dice rolling isn't a skill"

------

Never said it was. Said that dice luck or lack thereof is already
present as
are a variety of other aspects. Why single out difficulty eyeballing
distances as one aspect to mitigate without targeting others?

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Allan:
It smacks of game designers building their own particular group play
style bias into their rules, and those that allow pre-measuring should
be stamped down as having badwrongfun.

-------

Although I take the valid point here, equally people could claim (and I
know
some who do) that the dice are far too swingy to be reasonable in
Stargrunt
(that 1 on the ELITE die comes up rather alarmingly often), so why not
allow
people to use a more deterministic method? People misunderstand
communications from other players - why not roll back turns and replay
them
when this happens, etc?

The point to me is that games already inherently contain a number of
things
you could pick at. They also contain a limited range of choices that the
designers intend you to make. They also typically (if you aren't using
complex sensor rules like SFB for instance) provide you with more
information than your actual ship crew or infantryman would have (God's
eye
view plus some magical moment by moment status of the universe). So when
we
pick other *artificial* constraints, like a lack of pre-measuring, we're
just trying to balance this information out and inflict yet another
choice
on you. You don't see this as a valid designer choice - I don't see why
it
is any less valid than any other (most disadvantage one style of player
or
player aptitiude over another anyway).

If you want to pre-measure, I want fog of war. Both will slow down the
games, but if you want to make up for a defficiency in distance
estimation
(which as I say simulates sensor limits), then I want to introduce the
chances for deception and legerdemain and the uncertainty of fog of war.
I
don't think either of those cases is more or less valid - both change
the
game's limits, both change the player's choices.

So let me cast back the whole 'why not allow pre-measuring' aspect at
you -
it does in fact change the balance of the game, which in theory is
tested
and meant to be a certain way. Nothing precludes you changing it, but
you'll
alter the game in some ways and change balance in some outcomes. So why
is
one change to balance or outcome better? Why is having one choice in a
ruleset better or more mandatory than another?

I agree tradition plays a role here. But I don't think I can see
allowing
pre-measuring as not affecting the game and I don't think I can see
offering
it as an alternative as not affecting balance somewhat. And I can't see
this
change as having any special privilege of value or legitemacy over
others
which could alter balance and affect outcomes.

OTOH, having said that, whatever you do in your group that floats your
boat
and sets the balance *your group* wants is fine with me. But that also
includes nerfing fighters, having soapies and fighterfests, introducing
FoW,
or whatever. I just don't see the campaign for allowing pre-measuring as
any
different than any other suggestion to change a game limit or rule.

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Allan:

Which was exactly my point. Not allowing pre-measuring is often touted
as avoiding munchkinism. But you can't wipe out munckinism.

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Sorry, I had missed that if you said it. I agree with you. OTOH, my own
experience is that pre-measuring has led me into quite a few games with
munchkinism present (directly attributable to pre-measuring).

The most egregious is in stargrunt where people try to lurk outside of
key
range bands by making movement judgements down to the meter or where
they
try to be just outside of close assault range or the like or just barely
inside command radii.

SG, particularly (and likely FT too) has a lot of hard boundaries and
bands
and measurements *and the real world is much fuzzier*. In the real
world, I
could not stop 300.5m from a 'Green' unit and be absolutely unconcerned
about damage where moving to 399.5m made me vulernable (although, being
green, not terribly). The 6" command and burst radii are equally
arbitrary.
Since the game inflicts all of these sorts of arbitrary hard limits on
what
are not (in real world equivalents) that sort of situation, allowing
pre-measuring allows the sorts of 'gaming' of the system (and encourages
it
- if pre-measuring is present in the rules, people think it is
encouraged,
much like point systems foster a notion of balance that is illusory)
that
really feel cheesy at the table.

In a good group who wouldn't pre-measure just to avoid fire arcs or to
plot
moves to pinpoint precision, I could live with it. It does eliminate one
set
of judgment errors a commander could actually make in the real world and
it
takes advantage of artificial hard borders in the game that don't exist
in
the real universe, but I could live with it. If we had a player who was
*seriously* impeded by a disability of any sort, we'd probably adapt to
that
since it would be obvious he wasn't just gaming the system.
But as a generality, like a point system, pre-measuring can encourage
people
to think in cheesy ways (innocently, but because they still see it as a
game
and not a sim.... they look for advantage).

TomB

-- 
http://ante-aurorum-tenebrae.blogspot.com/
http://www.stargrunt.ca

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from
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will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine

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