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Subject: 
Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Sat, 1 Jun 2002 17:41:47 GMT
Viewed: 
3242 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Frank Filz writes:

Crud, you managed to respond to the one I realized was wrong and
canceled...

Doh!  Sorry.

I was thinking today, I
wonder if it was something patentable, that is the process of rolling
the sequence of d10s, obviously the table itself isn't patentable).

I don't know about patents, but I have read several discussions that suggest
that a game's core mechanics can not be protected IP, that only the turn of
phrase with which they are explained and fleshed out can be copy-righted.  But
they may have been only talking about copyright.

Sometime I need to do an analysis and figure out what the right number
of blows to disable an opponent is for my tastes (which run in the
direction of combat being possibly deadly, but rarely so, so it needs to
be several blows so you have a chance of bailing if your opponents are
lucky or you misjudged things).

So your players need to whack each orc twenty times before it goes down?

One of the problems I have with GURPS is
that I feel you can be taken out too quickly (which is realistic, more
than a couple good blows should take down an opponent).

I never felt any empathy for the GURPS system, I only use it as idea fodder.

But the majority of games that I've played for the past decade have been games
where death could come quite suddenly.  I very much like the feeling of being
afraid that I might die by engaging in combat.  The only real down side that
I've identified with this is that it leads the characters into ignoble
behaviors.  It's much easier in my friend Aaron's game to kill someone in
combat if you've shot them in a dark alley first.  The opposite of this was
Deadlands, in which it's almost impossible to die.

Perhaps the ideal is actually something where you have like between a 55
and 75 percent chance of landing a blow (so a skill level would just
give you a 2 or 3% bonus or so), and then like 5 blows being necessary
to disable and opponent (with critical hits throwing some randomness
in). Of course the problem would be that people would feel that their
skill increase wasn't worth much (even though a one skill level
advantage might still tip the odds to 55/45). Of course the counter
danger in such a system would be that there would be no real "wimp"
encounters, but that might not be a bad thing (do you really need to
play out battles where the PCs will win in 3 or 4 rounds with no
injuries? Do such opponents even need to exist?).

They're called children.  And they do exist, but it's not much fun to beat up
on them.  And usually the treasure isn't worth the hassle.

Chris



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
 
(...) Well, if computer algorithms are patentable, then the algorithms which form the core of a game system should be patentable (after all, a game system is just a "program" for "human computers"... Really, if you think about it, what is the (...) (22 years ago, 3-Jun-02, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
 
(...) Crud, you managed to respond to the one I realized was wrong and canceled... (...) There's quite possibly some slight errors. I remember the guy claimed you needed high precision computation to generate the table, it's possible he was using a (...) (22 years ago, 29-May-02, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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