-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
faff
I'm an impatient player and a very impatient GM. When designing games, I wanted a metric of how long a turn would take, based on the mechanics. Here's the results:
Adding stats together happens in all RPGs. In D&D you add your hit-bonus to any weapon bonus. In WoD you add Dexterity to Melee. There are two types of additions - standard additions and unique additions. A standard addition is an addition that the player does constantly - if your 3rd level fighter has a to-hit score of +3 and a +1 sword, then you know that for the rest of the adventure your total score is +4, so that'll count as an A once, not two a's for the two additions. Add that to the die-roll and you have your result. We'll mark additions as an A Unique additions we'll mark with a 'U'; those are the additions which change, e.g. a wound penalty or a bonus to hit from a spell your priest cast.
A standard addition can happen faster than unique addition, so I'll arbitrarily designate the standard addition A as 1 'faff point' and the unique addition U as 2 'faff points'.
Dice Rolls takes a little longer than an addition, so we'll mark that as a D, because you need to roll the die, then add the result. Other systems use a dicepool (P), which can take even longer to roll as the dice are collected and some calculation needs to occur between the dice.
As before, I can't work with Ordinal Maths so I'm just going to designate a dice roll (D) as 1 faff point and a dicepool (P) as 3 faff points.
Recording information comes next. D&D 4th Ed. records only that mooks die, not that they lose hitpoints. WoD records how much a mook is hit, by what damage and what penalty results. The damage type isn't generally important, so to be kind I think I would count that as two loads of information recording. Info-recording will be be denoted by an R, and on the assumption that a GM has set up the table to record things quickly, we'll mark that R as 2 faff units.
Bluff mechanics are where cards or a hand-sign is revealed at the same time. We'll mark that with a B and leave it at 2 points because even though it can be done quickly, it never is - players and GMs alike seem to want to press a little extra time into those tense bluff moments.
Finally, we have point expenditure. This can be fast for spending tokens and rather slower if people are recording the takings, so I'll just mark it as an R; after all, the points must be recorded somehow and then the bonus (or other modifier) calculated.
A = 1, U = 2, D = 2, R = 2, B = 2, P = 3.
It's hard to get a metric of exactly what's rolled all the time. The best way I can think of to get around this is to take an average - take some easiest plausible combat example and one of the more complex examples, perhaps pitting an advanced party against another advanced party.
So a game's 'Faff Index' (or FI) will be [simplest example + most complex example]/2.
We'll need to know how long combat last after that, so I'll use [ Average HP / Damage ].
Let's have a look at D&D's 3rd Ed.: The shortest pluasible example of combat would be two characters rolling for Initiative (D), adding the initiative bonus (A), recording the initiative (R), rolling for attack (D), then adding the attack bonus (A). Finally, one misses and the other hits, then rolls for Damage (D).
(2D + 2A + R) + (3D + 2A + R) = 13
The total number of rounds here is 1.
Next up, a look at a longer round. Both characters roll for Initiative (D + A + R) move (R), roll for attach using a unique Feat (U), hit, roll Damage with a unique bonus (D + U + R ), record the Damage (R), make two further attacks with a bonus (D + A), one of which also deal damage, with a bonus (D + A + R).
((4D + 3A + 3R + 2U) + (D + A + R)) x 2 = 42
Each combatant here has a score of 21, so that's 42 in total.
The average length of combat can be taken as the number of hit points divided by average damage. Hit points start at 10 for fighters, with an average of 5.5 each level after that (or 6.5 with a Constitution bonus ). Average Damage might be 2D6 for the largest available sword, plus maybe 4 for a Strength bonus to damage. That's 11 on average. Multiple attacks add Damage depending on the percentage chance to hit, which changes rather a lot from edition to edition. If the reader can forgive another numbers-fudge for the sake of simply examining the system, then I'll go with +10% per level average. So at 1st level, we'll take the chance to hit to be (50% + 10%) 60%, and at fourth level, 90% (meaning 90% of getting the basic 11 Damage given the combined attacks).
| Level | HP | Damage | Rounds | Faff Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | 6 | 2 | 55 |
| 3 | 24 | 9 | 3 | 83 |
| 5 | 36 | 11 | 3 | 83 |
| 7 | 50 | 13 | 4 | 110 |
| 9 | 64 | 20 | 3 | 83 |
| 11 | 75 | 22 | 3 | 83 |
Taking the average faff of the best and worst-case scenario to be ( (13 + 42) / 2 = ) 28, we can multiply that by the number of rounds to get a total expected time.
Despite composing this with entirely fudged numbers, I think it also shows why combat can take so long. With four players at 5th level, that's a total of 332. 332 times someone has to do something, like pick up a pencil, check their Feat bonus, roll and read a die, et c. et c. This is necessitated by rolling initiative each round, recording damage, and worst of all - waiting for the GM to do all of this, with multiple opponents, many times each round.
I'll add, finally, that these numbers seem too conservative, as I've seen small groups of players take a good forty minutes to complete a larger battle.
The original World of Darkness' shortest scenario is both characters rolling for Initiative (2 x (D + A R) ), an attack roll from both (2x (A + P) ), no soak roll, and an attack which inflicts enough Damage to kill (U + P). The total is 17.
oWoD's worst scenario is Initiative (D + A) then point expenditure (i.e. blood points) (R), then attack with a blood-bonus (U + P), damage dice being rolled (U + P), and the opponent rolling for soak (A + P), and damage being recorded (R). The total is 20, at least for characters with only one attack. Additional attacks increase the total by 18 each. The numbers threaten to vary wildly, given that Garou and Toreador cainites attack multiple times, while Nosferatu have Potence, which finishes battles faster. Anything near an approximation would probably require a per-discipline breakdown for cainites, and God-knows-what for garou. Still, adding only one extra attack leaves us at 38 for a longer scenario, leaving an average of 28.
If the numbers here are rough, it's no limitation of Mathematics. For any given campaign, someone can generally eyeball the Maths and note how many times dice will have to be rolled, and how long before something with 50 hitpoints can last if characters are dealing 10 Damage average per turn. The scenarios can always get specific enough to be precice.
This is how I like to think of system design. Taking an isolated case of 'you are a fast vampire, make +1 attack', designers of the oWoD system probably thought that seemed like a reasonable representation, without considering that they were multiplying the effort going into completing a simple action. Measuring pure faff here means that designers can look at the number of actions to complete a task and limit those actions. After all, players are more interested in results than process.
This view is also what got me thinking about multi-processing more. A fight between some brave fantasy warriors on a quest and 30 goblins sounds like a great idea, but the rules necessitate a GM rolling 30 dice for Initiative, 30 dice for attack, some number of dice for Damage. Strip aways the surrounding story and mechanics, and you're left with one guy rolling a dice 70 times in front of you. D&D made a fantastic move by not doing this in ... Pathfinder? Whatever edition is was, monsters took one Initiative roll for the lot, which means we've just cut out 29 dice rolls. The resulting one-hit-goblin-horde isn't a massive problem for the game, but 29 dice rolls are.
BIND's using multi-processing for all Initiative rolls (but not additions), and more importantly, it uses multi-processing for players. If 5 goblins attack 4 players each, that could be a GM rolling for 20 goblins, one after another. However, with people rolling for defence rather than attack, the game switches round to having 4 players make 5 defence rolls at the same time. This can fold that time (and therefore faff) into a single unit, so we're now down to 1 Initiative roll, and 5 defence rolls from the players.