Trump's Band of Evil

Trump's Band of Evil...

Mike Pence

This guy is the price we have to pay to get Trump out of office.  He's a religious zealot that has worked in government to attack women's rights and LGBTQ rights.  He's an awful human being.

Rex Tillerson 

Here we have an Exxon/Mobil executive with billions of dollars and business ties to Russia in charge of our foreign affairs.  I'm not totally comfortable calling him outright evil just yet, but that might be a familiarity issue.  I'm skeptical of him because he's another business man with billions of dollars.  I don't trust him to have the interests of the people of the United States at heart when he makes decisions.  I expect him to act in the interest of big business (especially big-oil) whenever possible.  I suppose there's an outside chance he won't turn out to be evil... but a very slim outside chance.

Steven Mnuchin

Here's another fun one.  Take a Goldman Sachs employee and hedge fund manager, and put him charge of the finances of the country.  So we have a guy that is super-rich, and loves making more money for the super-rich, and put him in charge of everyone?  Maybe if we had some assurance he wasn't going to screw us all over, it would be good to have someone that understands money that way at the helm.  But he's part of the problem.  He's part of the context that has been ruining our economy.  This guy is definitely evil.

Jeff Sessions

I found some denial of his racism online, but I also found gobs of quotes of his that are scary.  The man seems to dislike black people, is loved by the KKK (even if he doesn't say he likes them back).  He's also in strong support of "one-man-one-woman" marriage laws, which makes him a bigot.  I'm tired of people discriminating against the LGBTQ community.  They're human beings.  Like all the rest of us.  Sessions is evil.

Ben Carson 

This guy is a terrible role model.  He firmly stands up and says that evolution is a lie, and then points to his being a surgeon to support his stance.  There are people out there that will believe him because of his supposed scientific literacy, but the problem is that he's wrong.  He's provably flat-out wrong.  And the job he was given... what in his past qualifies him to help with Housing and Urban Development?  Ugh... might not be evil, but his influence certainly is.

Betsy DeVos

Religion is separate from Government for a very good reason.  Religion is not universal.  We don't all agree on it.  For government to be fair to all the citizens it represents, it CANNOT pay any heed or favoritism to any religion.  Period.  It shouldn't be in our courtrooms; it shouldn't be on our money; it shouldn't be in the pledge of allegiance; and it should never ever ever be part of the education system that our taxes pay for.  Sure, there can easily be academic classes to teach students about religions and their history, but a school should never suggest that any particular religion is correct.  And Betsy DeVos has publicly stated that she wants to put her God into schools.  This infuriates me.  And even beyond her offensive intentions, why did she get the job of Secretary of Education?  She has zero background in education.  She doesn't know anything about it.  I'm a software engineer.  If I apply for a job as a physician's assistant at a hospital, I expect to be looked at like I'm crazy and then told to leave.  I don't think she thinks she's evil, but like Ben Carson, her influence definitely is.

Scott Pruitt

I think he infuriates me as much as DeVos.  In the past he's sued the EPA to try get around protections for the environment, for his business interests.  He actively opposes the EPA.  And now he's in charge of it?  What the fuck is that?  And he denies human influenced climate change?  He's either stupid or greedy enough to deny it for business interest.  Yeah I'm getting worked up sitting here typing this.  I hate this guy.  I hate sitting here knowing that our government is actively working against the best interest of the citizens of this country; of the people of the world; of the environment and every living thing that depends on it.

Trump - Leader of the group

Selfish greedy asshole that is dismantling any limitations on business so that the super-rich can get richer, at the cost of the environment and citizens of the United States that are not super-rich; Lies to us despite video evidence on national television that he's lying.  Obviously evil.  Blatantly obviously evil.  He's a petulant waste of a human being that should never have been given any kind of power.  Someone needs to put him in his place and make him start working for the people instead of his business interests.  Someone needs to make him give up his stake in his businesses too.

I hate Trump.  I hate the world he's trying to make... not the one he says he's trying to make... the one he's actually making.  I want people to have jobs too... but unemployment is super low right now (thanks to Obama).  I want immigration reform so that people that want to come here have options to do it legally without waiting for 5 years.  I don't want a stupid expensive ineffective wall.  I don't want the LGBTQ community to suffer because some self-centered assholes think they know what some divine being wants (and I think which is in opposition to the teachings of Jesus which include being good to everyone).  I don't want our children to grow up thinking that creationism has as much validity as the big-bang, abiogenesis, and evolution.  I don't want our children to continue to fall behind the rest of the world in education.  I don't want the super-rich to be able to hold on to the power they've taken from us.

Jebus our country is a Plutocracy.  And that has to change.  We have to get the band of evil out of power.  We have to do something to fix the wage gap in this country.  We have to give power back to the EPA.  This country is falling apart, and Trump with his merry band of assholes is to blame.

The Problem With Published Pathfinder Modules

I'll start by saying that this is entirely an opinion.  I'll also say that I'm frustrated with one of the published adventure paths right now, so I'm sure it'll make me be tougher on the PF published adventures than I would normally be too.  But I also think there's enough logic behind my stance that I'm going to go forward with writing this blog post anyway.  So if you are interested in my thoughts on the Pathfinder Adventure Paths and PFS Scenarios... continue reading.

To lay a little foundation, I'll give you some of my background in playing Table Top Role-Playing Games.  Like what I imagine everyone else did if they learned to play when they were kids, I was a power-gamer.  I wanted to make the most powerful character with the highest numbers possible.  I didn't care about game balance.  I didn't care if any of it felt like a challenge... I just wanted my character to be outrageously powerful.  What's that?  Character depth and history?  Yeah I didn't care about that either.  At all.

I even ran some campaigns like that... where I was trying to give my players what I wanted.  I just wanted super cool powerful characters, and that's I think when I started to understand that there was more to it than high numbers and making what I thought were "cool" characters.  I was finding that I was having a hard time making things interesting.  I didn't know why at the time.

Years later, I was running another campaign where the characters were too powerful, and I was having a difficult time again with making it interesting or engaging.  I don't remember how I came up with the idea, but I wrote a session that was meant to balance out all their power, and actually give them a challenge.  I got the characters lost in a cave system, and in that cave system was a type of beetle that would burrow into your flesh and eat you from the inside.  Scarabs basically.  Might have been around the time I saw the movie: The Mummy.  I don't remember.

Anyway, they encountered some of the bugs, and a couple of the characters ended up having to dig beetles out of their own skin with knives.  That's pretty terrifying to me.  And it seemed to work on them too.  There were spots with swarms of these beetles chasing them, and their powers could fight a bit, but there was basically an unending supply of more beetles coming.  It became an exercise in escaping the caves to get away from the beetles.  And it was fun.  It was the first truly memorable session I ever ran.  And I think it's where I learned the lesson that characters need to be in some kind of danger (physical, emotional, whatever) for it to be engaging and fun.

So that was the death of my power gaming, but what comes after that?  Well... story.  Story comes after that.  If you start up a first person shooter video games, and play that for a couple hours, does story really matter?  No.  It doesn't.  You're a generic character with some kind of weapon, and you do your best to win against opponents in a game.  It can a lot of fun.  Don't misunderstand and think that I dislike a first person shooter with no character depth.  I'm just trying to help you understand that for me, the Table Top RPG became something different.

If I want some mindless fun for a bit, I might play a game like a first person shooter.  You can stop pretty much whenever you want... there's very little commitment beyond a single match.  But with TTRPGs I'm looking for a HUGE commitment.  To me they are more analogous to novels than video games.  The Game Master creates the setting and most of the people that inhabit that world.  And the Players create the main characters... the people that will be most featured in the story.

Think about the feeling you get when you read a novel you just can't put down.  You lose sleep, lose track of time, and are distracted when you have to do something else other than reading.  That's the goal to me in playing a table top role-playing game.  I want people to get together to share in a story that is engaging.

How do you do that though?  The author for a novel creates all the pieces, and things don't have to be perfectly consistent or balanced to tell the story.  When something needs to happen to serve the story, the author just makes it happen that way.  But in a "game" with multiple people there has to be some consistency for the players to rely on and for them to be able to make decisions for how their character will behave.

For example, if the main character in a book has thus far never been in a situation where they would have to pilot a helicopter, and the author had never mentioned it before... they can still just say that the character's dad was a hobby-kit helicopter pilot, and the character learned from their dad when he was a kid.  A sentence or two of explanation, and suddenly the character is flying everyone to safety from the collapsing island they were just on.

But in a game with other people, a character can't suddenly know something they didn't know before.  It has to have some balance.  All the main characters have to be similar in "power", and all the players have to be given choices for making their characters that allow them the same opportunities as everyone else.  And it would be pretty unfair if the opponent they might be set against always just had whatever he needed to get away... it has to be possible to accomplish goals in the game too.  You need balance.

And that's a pain in the butt for making engaging story.  You need a set of rules for the game to keep things fair, and you need to tell a story at the same time.  I think this is the biggest difficulty faced when trying to make an engaging role-playing experience.

So now back to how to make the story engaging.  The players take on a lot of the burden here.  Each of them is responsible for making one of the main characters of the novel (or series of novels).  The decide what kind of person to make... whether that person is selfish, or altruistic... ill-tempered or calm... charismatic or anti-social... strong or weak, graceful or clumsy, smart or not-so-smart, fast or slow...

And the players create the background for their characters within the setting.  Did they grow up with their parents?  Were they in a rough neighborhood or perhaps in luxury?  What things formed the person into who they are today?  What people from their past might still be important to the story (spouse, children, other family, neighbors, employers, gangs they belonged to, loan-sharks after them, whatever)?  Every bit of background gives the game master something to work with for future gaming sessions.  Maybe that loan shark is going to send a debt collector for you to deal with.  Or maybe the lone survivor of a tribe of orcs has finally caught up with you and will play a part in the story to come.

So anyway, I should probably get back to the purpose of this blog post.  You hopefully have a better understanding of what I look for in a table top role-playing game.  I want story, and I want the characters to matter... to affect the story.

Pathfinder (and d20 in general) is an interesting game system, but in my experience, its design lends itself best to combat.  And again, if that's what you're looking for, it handles it pretty well.  So if you're looking for combat heavy TTRPG... Pathfinder might be the thing for you.

But Paizo went an extra step that for me is unappealing.  I get that its a business, and it's a way to stay in business because you can keep publishing things for people to buy, but the pre-written modules/adventures/scenarios are awful for me.  Think about it a bit compared to what I said I look for.  Sure there's a lot of detail in their setting, and there is a story in there... but how can the character stories affect the stories pre-written by some publisher?  The published story has something about exploring a ruined castle for archaeological finds, and an NPC character tells you what you have to do from the beginning.  Your characters set out... and who cares that Greg Quinn grew up with an abusive father that motivated Greg to escape by joining the military where Greg met some of his best friends, but also where he lead a squad into an enemy stronghold and foiled some war-lord's plans?  Will any of that play into the Pathfinder scenarios?  Of course not.

By necessity the Pathfinder stories are generic.  Any character can fit in, and that character doesn't matter.  No matter how much detail and work you put into the character, the story won't change.

What else works that way?  Video games.  You create a character to play in the video game, and you are sitting back to pay attention to the story they wrote for you.  There's no out-side-the-box thinking.  In fact, there's a very specific inside-the-box thinking.  In both video games and pathfinder stories there's the expectation that after a fight, you search the body of the person you just fought and killed.  And you probably search the area around them too to see if you get some treasure.  Or jump to bop every brick with your head to see if a fire-flower comes out.  It's... It's not what good story is made of.  In Return of the Jedi after Luke defeats his father, and then his father defeats the Emperor... they don't spend time searching the Emperor's throne to see what cool stuff he might have hidden in secret compartments in there.

But to be "good" at playing Pathfinder, you need to think like that.  You need to search the sewage drain that the snake monster came out of to find the healing potions that the author put there for you.  If you don't find them, you're not going to be ready for the next fight the author wrote in.  And that's my big problem with Pathfinder scenarios and adventure paths.  Instead of featuring the characters in a custom made story, you have a story that you play through like a video game to get to the end and win.  It doesn't matter what characters are in the story.  And the story will never change to be engaging... it's just a string of excuses to get the characters from one combat (or skill challenge maybe) to the next one.

If all you're looking for is a shallow video-game-like experience with friends at the table... Pathfinder can be good.  If you want some depth, you'll have to write your own.  You could probably use the Pathfinder system, and even the setting, but you'd have to avoid the Pathfinder Society stuff.  By making a framework for people to be linked that way, they made it even harder to get good role-playing done.  Again... just my opinion.

If you do play Pathfinder published modules, don't forget to make your character search through the excrement filled sewage pipe for those healing potions.  The published adventure design requires that you think that way if you want to win.  And don't bother coming up with deep character story... it won't ever factor in.  Ever.

d20 vs 3d6 (or multiple dice) in roleplaying games

This blog post won't make much sense to you, if you're not a paper-and-pencil table-top role-playing-gamer.  I apologize for that, but this is what I've been thinking about.  I'm thinking about the use of 1d20 versus 3d6 as a resolution mechanic in the game.

Last night was the second session of a Pathfinder Adventure Path called Shattered Star.  Our characters are first level with nothing better for gear than the gear we started with (which is of course crap).  Our party has an arcane spell caster, an investigator, a paladin, and my fighter.  No dedicated healer.

Potential spoilers ahead if you're going to play Shattered Star, but it's crazy early in the campaign, and I won't give away stuff that you have to find out on your own.

We were looking for a particular woman that the Pathfinder Venture Captain in the area asked us to find.  They had some kind of business arrangement, and the Venture Captain wanted to know what happened to the woman who had disappeared.  And we found a building where she might be staying.  Just wanting to talk to her, we were surprised (spoilers incoming:) that the first door we went to had a couple armed guards that came out to meet us.  We tried to explain that we were looking for this girl with zero violent intentions... we just wanted to talk.  But they attacked us.  Taking the penalties so that we could knock them out instead of killing them, we suffered damage, and just tied them up.  So this was fight #1.  And we spent resources on it.

(still more spoilers:) Thinking that this was weird, we went to the other door (because the first door was apparently a guard house with no doors to the inside).  We opened the door to find the floor broken and missing.  Below floor level was city sewage.  Three goblins attacked us.  This was fight #2.  We spent some more resources, took a little more damage, and still just wanted to talk to this woman.

(still more spoilers:) We went into the next room to find most of its floor missing too, and three more goblins to kill.  Fight #3.  More resources spent.  We went into the next room to find no foes, but still a missing floor with sewage at the bottom.  The final room on that floor was still floor-less, and we got talked at by some sort of snake/goblin thing that claimed to be the king.  It didn't attack us though, and we were still hoping to talk to this girl.  At this point I thought we might be rescuing the girl or something.

(spoilers:) We climbed a ladder to a second floor, and found the woman we were looking for, but she was suited for being tied up in a padded room.  She was the queen of the goblins.  Two of her goblins attacked us, and she did too.  This is fight #4.  She did some serious damage to us.  But we managed to defeat her without killing her.  The snake thing came back out to take something from us, and we fought it too.  Fight #5, though I'll admit it didn't sap us as much as the other fights.  At this point our band of first level characters were out of spells, and the paladin and my fighter had used their only cure potions.  My fighter had 4 hit points left, and the paladin had 3 hit points left.  We thought we were done.  But we were wrong.

(probably the last paragraph of spoilers:) We got outside the building, and some well geared woman with three well armed and armored goons comes out and says that she'll let us go if we give her a magical item that the girl we were looking for had.  This magic item is something we (as the players) recognized as central to the plot of the whole adventure path, and we didn't want to give it up... so we fought...

No more spoilers: We were out of resources, low on hit points, and facing our sixth consecutive fight as level 1 characters against an equal number of level 2 characters.  I'm told this is balanced... but I disagree.  We fought, and then in addition to the fight being unbalanced to begin with, our dice were trying to kill us.  We were rolling our 1d20 to see if we could hit our foes, and 7 out of 10 rolls were 5 or below.  Hooray for the law of independent probability.

Three of our four characters ended up in the negative hit points (unconscious), and the fourth ran away with the magic item.  We probably should have died.  The bad guys should have just killed us, and the campaign should have been over.  The one survivor could have continued I suppose.  I assert this was a poorly written encounter if you consider that the characters are first level, have shit gear, and (minor spoiler:) might not find the healing potions hidden along the way through that set of fights.  We did not find them.

But beyond the encounter being poorly designed, the dice really were against us.  We rolled a lot of ridiculously low rolls that meant we were ineffective.  We did almost nothing to the bad guys in that last fight, and it was frustrating to sit and watch as everything we tried to do failed while they whittled us down from our already pathetic state of being.

The fact that 1d20 can so thoroughly ruin an evening of what is supposed to be fun is why I'm writing this whole thing.  It's a question of linear probability instead of a bell curve.

Linear Probability: the d20 system
Skill at striking a foe in combat in the d20 system (and Pathfinder in specific for my example) means having a static number as a modifier that you add to a roll with one twenty-sided die.  My fighter with his bow against those foes last night was rolling 1d20+7.  I'm pretty sure the thugs had an armor class of 18, and the female foe had an AC of 14.  So against the thugs, my character would have to roll 11 or higher to hit them... exactly 50% of the possible values on the die.  A 50% chance.  And because the rolls have no effect on each other, it is just as possible for me roll ten 5's in a row as it is to roll an 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.  There's no tendency on a single die.  Any value is just as likely as the others, every time you roll.

To me, this is awful.  Some weak mook NPC with a +1 to hit, compared to our paladin who has a +4 to hit has most of the decision about whether they actually hit made by the d20.  The number of times each of them hits over the course of ten rounds might just as easily be that the mook hit all ten times, and the paladin hit zero times.  The d20 controls it completely, where the modifier has so little effect on it that it barely matters.

And the way the system is designed, the defenses increase at the same rate as the hit modifier, so it REALLY doesn't matter.  It's all about the stupid damnable d20.  I hate it.

Bell Curve: using 3d6 in GURPS
Rolling 3 six-sided dice means a total number of possible combinations of 216.  54 of those combinations add up to either 10 or 11.  A little over 48% of the possible combinations are represented by 9 to 12 which is four of the possible results out of sixteen (the numbers 3 to 18).  So 25% of the results occur 50% of the time.  This is the bell curve.  Most of the time you roll 3d6, you'll have a result near the middle of the possible results.  Rolling a 3 can only happen with exactly one of the 216 possible combinations, giving it a 0.46% chance of happening.  Reaching one of the extremes is very unlikely.  It happens... but not often.

So what does this mean?  In GURPS you have skills that have a number, and your goal is to roll less than or equal to that number to succeed.  So if you got yourself a skill of 12 with a sword (above the average of 10), you would have a ~74% chance of succeeding when you roll those 3d6.  And because of the bell curve (the tendency to have a result closer to the middle), skill makes much more of a difference than the die does.  If you increase your skill to 15 for example (3 points higher than the 12, just like the +4 in Pathfinder was three points higher than the +1), your chance of success goes up to a little over 95%.

Comparison
Pathfinder...
Attack Mod +7 versus an armor class of 13 means that a roll of 6 or better would succeed.  So this would mean a 75% chance of success.

GURPS...
Skill 12 means a 74% chance of success.

In the session last night of Pathfinder, my archer with a +7 attack mod (which is huge for a first level character) rolled high enough to hit once out of four shots in that final fight.  A 25% success rate for something that was supposed to be closer to 75% (one of the shots was against the more armored foes, which would have been the 50% chance).

That one example shows that in real life it's possible with a non-bell-curved single die to deviate in a huge way from the original probability.  And this character that I designed so intently to have a huge attack modifier was subject to the die, and it didn't matter how much skill he had at firing a bow.

I can say with confidence that the person with a skill of 12 in GURPS rolling 3d6 four times would have been more likely to actually roll close to the predicted probability.  Because the bell curve has a tendency toward the middle results.  The likelihood is that the skill 12 person would have hit 3 of the 4 shots instead of 1.

The bell curve makes it more predictable.  So instead of the easy possibility of a foe with a +1 attack modifier doing better than the character with a +4 attack modifier, skill actually matters when you use a system with a bell curve.  The person with a skill of 15 in GURPS in about 20% more likely to hit than the person with the 12.  And the die rolls will come close to that.  Spending character resources to improve a skill in GURPS has a more reliable benefit, and the system isn't built so that attack modifiers and defenses progress at the same rate.

Conclusion
The d20 system of resolution in games sucks.  It is more likely to lead to nights of frustration playing a game... which is supposed to be a fun fantasy escape from reality for a little while.  Why choose that kind of randomness?

Incomplete Idea
Just use 3d6 instead of 1d20 if you're going to play a d20 game.  Rolling a 3 is an auto-fail or critical-fail, and rolling an 18 is auto-success or critical success.  If Pathfinder is balanced such that middle-value rolls should succeed, then it doesn't matter that we can't get a result of 19 or 20.

With a Paladin attacking with a +4 mod, his rolls would likely have ranged from 13 to 16... which is a tiny bit low compared to the ACs that our foes had... which makes me think Armor Class would need to be tweaked.  Or perhaps the replacement for 1d20 would be 3d6+2?  Hmm.

Well... like I said: incomplete idea.