No math in games, thanks

Yes, but the point is that it's possible to define the same pattern (the progress on a skill slowing down the higher it goes) without those complicated formulas and in a way that is directly transparent.

That level of complexity is just not necessary. Pen&paper games already simulated those situations. This is from Stormbringer, straight from the rulebook:
- Suceeding at a poorly-known skill is hard, but you learn a lot when you succeed. An expert in a skill usually suceeds at it. Since he or she already knows most of what there is to know about it, the expert improves at a slower rate than a novice.

This is already way more evolved and realistic than any mmorpg out there. This can be gameplay. Something that the players understand and can relate to directly. The math used there just doesn't bring anything to the table. It only gets in the way.

I just took that as an example but what I said was intended more as an universal principle. No rule in the game should be mathematically intensive. That type of complexity is USELESS. It just makes the game obscure and harder to maintain. Try to find a bug between a million of complicated formulas, try to figure out if everything works as intended or if there's a problem somewhere. That level is just unmanageable.

And it's also an approach that brings you directly off-track. Not only it is useless, but it's a huge risk that you'll pay later. Because it brings you to tackle the problems in the wrong way and focus on structures that are meaningless for the players.

Game design should never be about that.

Pen&paper games already simulated those situations. This is from Stormbringer, straight from the rulebook: (..)

And this is fine, but then how it's translated into actual mechanics? That is, how exactly it is determined over the course of play if one did succeed at the skill, and how much they learn if they did?

Because what you have here is the symbolic version of the idea. But then _somehow_ it has to be put in practice...

Yes, it IS put in practice. I didn't copied the concrete rule because I just wanted to point out how the exact same pattern was simulated.

I don't have the rulebook under my eyes, but if I remember correctly you have a simple percent value on a skill. As you use the skill during an adventure you "check" the box next to it on the character sheet. Then, at the end of the session, you roll a 100 dice. If the roll is above the value you have in that skill, the skill improved and you roll another dice to see how much.

This means that the more the skill goes up, the harder it will be to roll above it and improve it. The rulebook also considers "grand mastery" and skills going above 100%. And you can finetune all these aspects as you like.

My "dream mmorpg" is actually based on the exact same ruleset even if now I have different plans about the combat and the skills, but you can find my old ideas here. When I brainstormed about the herbalist skills I also designed a system that was versatile and still directly usable and transparent for the players.

The pen&paper games were already there and were already MUCH more advanced and elaborate than every mmorpg out there. And without any of the added complexity.

This isn't a detail. This is a fundamental mistake that the great majority of the developers and designers out there aren't even remotely considering. It is important both for the players (so that the systems are "readable" and not obscure) and the developers and designers (so that the code is much easier to maintain, understand, test and expand).

If you know how hard it is to advance a skill at a certain point, you can begin to tell how long (how many tries) it should take a place to advance the skill.

For instance, using what looks like it may be DAOC's model, "Scaled skill improvement based on inverted rating":
rating ∈ [ 0, 1, 2, … 1000 ]
chance = ( rating^2 ) / MAX(rating)^2 * -1 + 1

At 400 skill, I should have an 80% chance to improve skill for any action my character performs (such as a crafting combine), or for every five combines, four will result in an improvement to character's skill. By comparison, at 900 skill, 14% of the successful combines will improve the skill, or roughly three in twenty.

The game designer can take these numbers and say, "No, I believe skill improvements should come less frequently" and can tweak the equation to produce the results (and graph) that matches what is the design requires. The designer can also begin to estimate the average total number of combines that should be needed to max that skill, determine how long each combine should take, and provide a result for how long a player should spend maxmizing that skill and compare that with the goal in the design document.

What I didn't say in the blog posting was that the chance to improve (or succeed at) a skill should be generated as a table, either when the server starts or in a data file. It can be quicker to look this value up than to calculate it, especially when working with complicated formulas or those that themselves require table lookups (sin/cos/tan, etc.).

Nebulous statements like "it's harder to advance a skill when you're already an expert" need to be backed up by some rule. In a PnP game, it's more likely to be a GM's judgement call or house rule ("To save Lagolass from the poison, the master alchemist had to find the correct plant out of season, work under a time limitation, under stress as his friend lay dying, and with less than ideal laboratory conditions. I think he learned something."). MMOs don't operate with fuzzy rules, generally, and to keep the game moving reasonably well for thousands of players, things must be simplified and described concretely. If people complained that DAOC or Eve were spreadsheets turned into games, there were good reasons for it: the design had to be modelled somewhere, someway, and predictably. Failing to adequately state or model this kind of mechanic can lead to balance problems when the game is tested or goes live. It's almost always cheaper to test something in a spreadsheet than it is to code it into a server.

Copying the comment over to your blog.

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What I criticized is not the rule itself, but the trend. I just picked up the occasion to rant about those points.

If you start to use that approach for something basic like the skill improvement, you’ll finish to use similar formulas to calculate health, mana, regeneration rates, to hit rolls, resistances and so on. At the end the game will be PERMEATED by those rules.

The point is: Is it possible to instead use a transparent system even for the players that is able to reproduce similar patterns?

That math is really necessary? Is it INDISPENSABLE?

I think it isn’t. There are better, much simpler ways to “translate” those rules.

DAoC is one perfect example of a messed ruleset that even Mythic’s programmers cannot figure out anymore. It grew complicated and inflated and the majority of the mechanics, even those directly exposed to the players, are incredibly hard to figure out and understand completely.

That complexity, imho, is useless. For the simple reason that I believe there are better alternatives.

I don’t criticize the merit of your rule or what it tries to simulate. I criticize the approach. In the case there’s a simpler one available.

Oh, and spreadsheets are probably the worst way to test the balance in a game. They are blind about the gameplay and are more rough approximation than the biased perception of a player.

There’s no need for spreadsheets when the game systems can be tested properly with a piece of paper, a dice and a pencil. That’s enough to simulate EVERYTHING.

Duplicated in my blog.

I can’t think of many PnP games which use pure percentages for character skills. Most that do (Rolemaster, for instance) are hybridized, with level advancement dictating skill improvement.

RuneQuest did. I’ll have to review my copy later to verify how skills advance, but it wasn’t “simple”–it could be done with pen and paper, but there was a reason that the RQ players didn’t encourage novices to join their game in my high school.

Star Wars (West End Games/Greg Costikyan) arguably did. Admittedly, skills weren’t based on percentages but dice were rolled against ranges. The Ghostbusters RPG, Shadowrun, and Traveller 2300/Twilight 2000/Dark Conspiracy, among others were similar. Each had different mechanisms for advancing skills, but most were generally purchased. Traveller (the original) was notoriously difficult for advancing character skills, but it could be done.

All of these, however, required some mechanism that would be more or less difficult to implement. Purchasing skill improvements isn’t a bad idea, but in the interest of simulation, MMO designers seem to have taken their cues from many CRPG designers and MUD developers: take advantage of the computer and let it keep track of what skills improve. Just like real life, skills only improve with use, and in game skills can advance as they are used.

Players also spend a lot more time playing an MMO than they would playing a PnP game. Dedicated RPers might play a single character for 24 hours a month, while typical MMO players may play 24 hours per week. Characters in MMOs are also more active than in PnP games: if you’re not out fighting something in 15 minutes in DIKU-derived games, you’re either crafting, RPing, or still stuck at the auction house. In a PnP game, it’s not uncommon to spend 30 minutes on a scene or important conversation, and more than that on a single battle. Time limits how far you can advance your character in a PnP game, and it may take a couple years to max out for a given campaign (say, level 20 for a D&D3E game), so the games are necessarily scaled differently.

An MMO character is played more often, and is more active during a typical session. (When was the last time a PnP character slaughtered 700 creatures in a gaming session without the use of explosives? My DAOC characters averaged that over a four or five hour session.) The game necessarily needs to scale differently, not just to keep the player busy for three months or more, but also to provide an appropriate feeling of the growth of power. Applying PnP rules to a PvE MMO would quickly cause the player to run out of directions for growth (and thus we have one of the reasons DDO has to be fundamentally different from D&D3E in character advancement).

However for PvP, players want their characters to max out quickly and to assume an equally competitive state with other player characters. In that case, your simplified PnP mechanics are absolutely appropriate: a minimum of PvE content with the focus of the game on PvP (ala Shadowbane) means that characters can and should max quickly and easier mechanics result in easier to balance systems. Arguably, even these systems should be reduced to mere equations so that actual character advancement in game can be verified against the expected rates to help find bugs or imbalances.

I don't have the rulebook under my eyes, but if I remember correctly you have a simple percent value on a skill. As you use the skill during an adventure you "check" the box next to it on the character sheet. Then, at the end of the session, you roll a 100 dice. If the roll is above the value you have in that skill, the skill improved and you roll another dice to see how much.

Well, and here is the catch. What you describe is nearly exact copy of one of the models in the original blog you criticize for "math overuse". The diffrence is merely in the way implementation was written down -- in the P&P game you have it translated into mechanical process of random roll vs sliding scale difficulty that goes up with skill level. In the blog, this very same process is written as:

chance = (max_skill_level - current_skill_level) / max_skill_level + floor

... that's all there is to it. I don't think there's much merit in the complaint about the particular way implementation is written down, when the player is never going to see it in the first place ... but they'll rather receive concise "90% chance to improve on next use" tooltip when they mouse over the skill, with the value calculated for them behind the scenes. (on top of mentioned earlier general explanation how this particular piece of mechanics works)

But you aren't saying anything new. That's exactly my point.

The pen&paper mechanic I pointed there and the one I defined "not readable" are essentially the same.

The only difference is that one can be easily understood by a player. The other not so much.

I don't think there's much merit in the complaint about the particular way implementation is written down, when the player is never going to see it in the first place.

This is the point. I want the players TO KNOW and understand what goes on behind the scenes. I want them to know and use the ruleset in the first place.

I want EVERYTHING disclosed and easily readable.

The only difference is that one can be easily understood by a player. The other not so much..

Let's be honest here. It's not really about what's being easily understood by "a player". Isn't it more a case of you personally having difficulty to interpret this particular implementation, and extrapolating it into "since _i_ can't read it easily then it means no regular player could, also"..?

"Easily understood" is to large degree relative, and relies on person't knowledge and intelligence. For example, "the better you get, the harder it gets to become even more skilled" would probably be understood well by about anyone because it doesn't involve anything specific. But the "mark number of times you used the skill, roll dices and compare with your current skill level"? To you, this might make perfect sense and be absolutely clear. But to someone who wasn't taught at least basics of probability, or who fails to understand them ... to such person this sort of "easily understood" implementation is complete black box. You roll dices and sometimes you get a skill increase but sometimes you don't. Why? heck knows. damn math junkies overcomplicating these games that should be all about heroics and myths.

I don't know what link you followed but I've always been for transparent systems with intuitive gameplay. Not simulations, at least on this level.