I don't want to repeat myself so I'll just skip to new parts.
Agamemnon wrote:
The Freakish Roll issue.
The next point raised was something along the lines of "but freakish rolls are possible and get worse as die pool size increases." (....)
Personally, I don't think this is worth spending too much time worrying about.
And that's pretty much sums it up. If you can accept it in game design, it's your game after all.
On Challenge
I don't follow your use of gamist and narrativist here at all. In fact, it seems like you're using them backwards. His version claims that because in the narrative you are the best swordsmen, you are, in fact, the best swordsmen -- that sounds like a narrative approach. On the other hand, you're arguing that your opposition must mechanically scale with you in order to remain a challenge... I don't see how that's not the gamist position here.
First of all, challange as a word isn't written in any gaming style. It might be common or more obvious for one style than another but it is on different scale all togheter.
Second of all, I protest against treating it as worse god's child with silly remarks. Gamism is equally good, I have a player that regullary request duengon crawl sessions. It just does not suit tros very well in my opinion. Thirdly, let's see...
Gamism according to first definition I found:
A gamist makes decisions to satisfy predefined goals in the face of adversity: to win.
So you have a predifned scenario in which stats are set in stone (more or less) and players want to beat it. It does not have to be a duengon. It might be as well lord that killed your family. In gamistic approach, lord is always the same since it is a scenario to beat. If you created a good swordsman, you will beat him (most likely), if you created a scholar, you might be in trouble.
In narrative terms, it doesn't matter what stats do lord have. I want a good story. Granted, it is not literature of highest standards, rather pulp fantasy stories with clear main plot arch but is story regardless. In my story, I will have a final showdown fight at the top of bell tower with thunders flashing. And I will adjust skills of evil lord accordingly.
Having said that, I am simulationist by heart. I do not want to push the limits of the world too far. If we agree that pikeman should have say 10 CP, why his leader should have 21? That's why I wrote about opposition scaling. If you create a top, legendary swordsman you will not fight footpads in my scenarios.
Benedict said (more or less) that if he creates a top swordsman, he should be able to beat this lord with one hand eating an apple with another. Why? Because he has too good stats for this scenario. That fits predefined challange level that you have with say, DnD official scenarios. I say, yeah, you are top swordsman. But this lord is feared throughout kingdom as well...
This is why people hate GNS, by the way. No one can agree on what those words actually mean in context half the time.
Possibly. For me it's mainly about "beating the game" in gamistic and "running a story" in narrativism. In pure narrative context, you wouldn't even have stats to begin with.
Games can be built with one of two assumptions. The first assumption is that you start as the equivalent of a level 1 character and gain power and ability through play over time, eventually becoming big damn heroes/badasses in the process. The second assumption is that you're creating big damn heroes from the start and that your power level reflects that. 'Bastards takes that assumption from the start.
Well, that's just wrong I guess.
There is much more to that scale. For example once we played tros final fantasy style. Players created teenagers, stats were curbed accordingly. A squire was still a good swordsman, he just wasn't conan material yet. They did not face evil lords, vampires and stuff like this. One of the first opponents was a drunken deserter. It's just the story that took them to save the kingdom by being in right time at right place on few occasions.
At other time same gaming group picked legendary heroes. They created very strong characters not only using higher priorities at char creation but also recieving extra spiritual attributes to spend on whatever they wanted. They wanted heroic fantasy, stuff of tales, dragon slaying and saving the world. So they recieved.
Most of the time we kind of play in medium style between those two extremes. Players are top proffesionals. They are elite mercenaries, veteran scouts, top thieves and so on. They are known and respected but still have to think about other respected proffesionals.
This is why I think karma is poor mechanics (and very gamistic if you think about it). Instead at group creation I ask them "what kind of stories do you guys want". Why should a player who, say, plays for the first time or spent his karma on last campaign become a sidekick material in heroic fantasy? Because he didn't have time to amass karma?
You can start out the bat as one of the best, if not the best swordsmen in the setting because we want you to start off as the kind of protagonist that you're going to read about or watch a movie about. With the exception of Hero's Journey stuff, the characters in question are badasses from the start. There is no part of The Witcher book series in which Geralt has to level up to be good at his job.
At the same time, he got his ass whooped by Vilgefortz. Food for thought
And another great swordsman? Ciri? Got beaten by Bonhart. Won with him in the end using terrain. What a great story it is.
You yourself point out the absurdity that in the video games you need to grind for levels to get the character to live up to their concept. On the other hand, no one forces anyone to build their character around maximizing CP for a specific weapon. I've yet to see any character in my group come close to maxing out their CP at character creation.. and even if they did, I fail to see how "I want my character to be the best possible swordsman" is less valid than "I want to be the best possible thief."
It's not. Every character has a part to play in scenario.
The "level 20 in a 1st level dungeon" is a bad comparison from the start because the difference between a level 1 and a level 20 character in D&D is almost peasant to demigod.
So make it 5 lvl vs 1st lvl scenario, the point is, if it is too easy, it is simply boring. Game has to provide challanges. Be it riddles, planning, skill usage or profficiency usage. If players breeze through scenarios like wind it becomes simillar to early superman stories - plain boring.
The second issue is working off of the logic of "A boss encounter." The very concept doesn't work well in a game like ours. Even if you give him 30CP to the player's 15CP, a three-on-one won't go very well for him. Even a two-on-one is pushing it, and then you'd have to come up with a damned spectacular explanation for how this character had 30CP in the first place.
I beg to differ. For me tros combat system works greatest in duels. This is how we always run battles:
Someone commands so rolls are made for armies.
There is an important moment. Say, leader of enemies breaks our ranks with his elite bodyguards. Someone has to stop them. Top swordsman kills another mook and run acros the battlefield to cross swords with bloke who killed his wife. He defeats him, morale gets up for a moment but battle still goes wrong way. Commander decides it's time to use a crushing blow of cavalary to the side. But wait what's happening? Cavalary man can't cross section of a town that is guarded by heavy crossbow and bow fire. We need our sharpshooter player to lead his scouts to engage those bastards. We have a shooting competition. And cavalary strikes finally but not really in time. Our commander is overwhelemed. His troops now face 3 times their opponents. Our commander need to last 9 combat rounds against 3 opponents at once. If he kills one, he has untill next 3 combat rounds between someone else jumps in...
That's why I fall in love with a skirmish, it gave me a tool to really work around mass combat (not battle size but more than few fighters) in a cool and exciting way. For years though, we solved most mass conflicts with scenic duels.
This is the exact opposite of how I would advise handling this. The numbers have meanings. If someone is supposed to be a really skilled opponent, it's perfectly reasonable for an NPC to have a prof anywhere from 8-10. That's in the realm of "normal achievement." If you really want this to be a famous one-of-a-kind opponent, you can get away with a little higher. I don't like ever going above 11 simply because that's what PCs can start with, but if you can push it to 15 or so before you start to look ridiculous. Add in another 4-6 from reflex (unless you're going to make it a point to describe him as crazy-ass clever AND agile, all of which should have been described and incorporated into the character well before the actual fight happened) and you can create an NPC swordsman who will make a decent challenge for just about any PC. Even if said PC has a higher die pool, the NPC can always have better resources, armor, minions, whatever than the PC does to even things out.
Look. Wladimir Klitschko is top boxer of the world isn't he? He recently got beaten by Anthony Joshua, another top tier boxer. He got defeated by Tyson Fury which by that also has to be considered top fighter. We still have Denotay Wilder, Parker, Luis Ortiz and if we go to lower tiers, we still have some interesting contenders, all well known and great fighters who would mop the floor with 99,9% of population of other boxers.
And that's just boxing. We have also UFC, we have martial arts , we have streetfighters and you can always go with buddist monks that are unknown but potenially great opposition to our great, top fighting , legendary imagined PC. If a player create maxed boxer, does it mean he has no meaningfull opposition equal to them?
I see it simillar with sword fighters. There were for sure some legendary fighters everywhere in the world. In Poland for example there was Zawisza Czarny, which is unlikely to be ever heard about if you are not Polish. He won several tournaments in Europe, at the same time, there were most likely several other knights of his time in Europe that were undefeated. I can see how some elite bodyguards, top veteran soldiers and so on still posess a challange for Zawisza.
The moment you decide "NPC=Player's CP-3" you're creating a Dragon Ball Z spiral in which each opponent winds up having to make the last opponent look like a chump and it makes you wonder where Big Bad The Sixth was at with his 42CP back when we thought Big Bad 2 was scary with his 25.
No because as I wrote many times, difficulty level raises. First they kill a bandit leader. They find out that bandits are sponsored by one of the lords in order to create chaos in the realm to make king look weak. So they go against the lord. They face his important man. Kill him. That makes him angry, he sends assassins. They got wiped. Eventually they will face evil lord's right hand. And after that evil lord himself. And than they will find out, that lord is just a tool in hands of darker forces...And we con go with extranatural...It is all very natural, story driven, not stats driven.
Worse, you wind up with the 3.5 D&D situation where characters never really feel like they are getting better at things because the higher your scores get, the higher the rolls you need are. You're only ever just barely good enough so you wind up feeling like you needing to maximize every possible number because the moment you went from 40 to 45AC you noticed all the enemies your DM went from 30AB to 35.
Yeah, we have one powergamer in our group and players often take a laugh from his outcries, that he would like better armor, better stats and so on
They don't have feeling they need to get better. They want to make cool stories. They know the whole progression is just an illusion and we keep it in there just to make this poor fella have his advancment.
Anyway, for gamistic systems progrssion means being able to beat higher level monsters. For narrativist it's about progressing in the story, isn't it?
I've argued before that after a certain point, it's just not worthwhile to keep advancing your CP because you're already better than 99% of stuff you're going to fight. I see now why you didn't find that a worthwhile argument -- because you're not modeling the world as it is, you're modeling the world as a game. Which is fine, you can do whatever you want, but that's not really how the system is supposed to work and you're going to get weird results because of it.
It's not how I model it. But let's for the sake of argument assume so.
So you design a game, see a flaw that makes it not work as it suppose to and... blame potential player?
Do you want to make a game for your own group or for general population that might run zillions of sessions with it?
We are a game with a fun combat system, but we aren't a game solely about a combat system. If you have a character who has made a ridiculously masterful swordsman, then it's obvious they want to be good at being a swordsman and get into a lot of swordfights. That's great! Enjoy! But that's not where the "challenge" of the game needs to be for them. Swordfighting will probably be a part of it, but the challenge is in their SAs. What hard choices are they being forced to make? What obstacles do they have to overcome?
Does one exclude another?
Compare with Skills and Attributes
On the other hand, if we're going to entertain any of the above do any of the problems occur with skill and attribute rolls? Both max out at 8 in normal people, 10 as the absolute max, and 5 points of SA.. to say nothing of dice from tools or tapping.
In short, yes.
Huge pools of skill rolls make skill rolls kinda akward. Was it not in bob that 10+ dice rolls were deemed automatically succesful? Why?