Re: Re: Mastery notation -- from the Continuum list, was: MG's

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 05:47:39 +0100

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 01:23:44PM -0500, Mike Holmes wrote:
> >It's not at all clear that div/mod by 20 calculations per roll are
> >easier than base-20 addition per augment (or sitmod) -- though I suppose
> >that'll partly depend on how common, and how large, modifiers are.
>
> I think that these two are about the same in terms of difficulty (in some
> ways they're the same thing). But starting with decimal you have to do one
> less of these functions overall. That's certainly less work, no?

I don't think so. Now, I have to look at "53" on my character sheet, and tell myself, "ah-hah, my TN is 13, and I have two bumps", i.e., the div/mod calculation referred to. And that's even if I _didn't_ have to modify the rating, or indeed, whether the rating 'wrapped around' a mastery, which is the only case you have to do base-20 calculations otherwise. And rarely are you going to be adding a modifier greater than 20 (and even when you are, what's the betting it's a multiple of 20, or at least of 30?), so it's pretty much just a single "carry a mastery" (or not) step.  

> >Now of course, if you just happened to make the game-scale one mastery =
> >10 TN increments (c.f. the 57 varieties of d10/d12 variant)...
>
> Cerrtainly, and I'd be right there, except I don't like how any of the crits
> work for these, unfortunately, or the relative HP costs, etc.

That latter's a pain all right -- it boiled down for our group between being progression more 'lumpy' (and perhaps consequently, more narrowly focussed), or making them (gasps of shock and horror) in effect, fractional.

OTOH, I've found the crits to be win-win-win. They're the same frequency overall, they progress more smoothly, and they're open-ended (just for larfs),

Mind you, we never went the final mile and junked the mastery notation altogether. i.e. we're still writing "1W2", instead of "21", which we might as well be doing, really... Must be a case of gathering around to sing songs about how good the old light-bulb was, I suppose.

Cheers,
Alex.