Cost Estimation

After doing some checking it appears the cost is (Current/(1-Factor))-Current where "Factor" is the decimal number in the "average" column (so .38 for -8 DM) and Current is whatever AP value you are presently at.

• This is the last step you do when totaling up your character.
• If you have more than 1 TAP you add all the Factors together.
• Round all fractions up
• If the sum is more than 1 it won't work (the formula goes into negatives which isn't right

The solution is what you pay in addition to your already computed AP cost.

The tested values come out pretty close to the computed values. Here's an example:

I have a character with Built (8 AP) and Tank (Armor) for 8 AP. The current character is 16 AP. I want to add -8 DM to that character. The math is: (16/(1-.38))-16 = (16-.62)-16 which is 25.80-16 which is 9.81 which rounds to 10 AP. The total cost is 16+10 = 26 AP for the character. According to the chart the cost for -8 DM between the 24 and 32 AP range is 10 AP. So that works.

Whether or not the math is right, however, isn't really the point here. The interesting part of this is how much math do we expect the JAGS player to do?

The answer is not summed up easily. Here's my thinking.

First Things First: There is a Basic and Advanced/Optional Game
Ideally players who are either (a) new to JAGS and/or (b) have no patience for decimal math should not be forced to do it to get a reasonable experience out of the game. That means breaking down things into tables where the math is already done as possible. It means not having skill costs or AP costs that use fractions (other than maybe .5). It means rounding and doing best-fits where we can.

NOTE that the table for TAPs more or less accomplishes that: the costs are all whole numbers and all you have to do is find your AP cost and you know what you pay (assuming you are building on a fixed budget).

However: We Expect the GM Might Do More Math
What role the GM plays in a traditional RPG is very complex (well, my thinking on it is, anyway) and it's outside the scope of this post. Notably, though, the GM may do some things very differently than players. The GM will likely have different goals and will have a broader spectrum of responsibilities with  regards to some mechanics issues (such as trying to ensure that the elements that appear in the game are at least "reasonable" and perhaps "fair.")

In order to do this the GM may do things like:

1. Build characters "without a budget" but wish to know "how much they cost."
2. Attempt to create challenges such as battles within a certain specific tolerance level for difficulty (this would be seen if the GM is interested in creating interesting battles that are essentially fair fights)
3. Create single opponents that will fight many (such as Boss characters)
4. And so on.

Note: I'm not saying the GM will do all these things (a given GM may simply create challenges he or she thinks "make sense" without regards to "fairness" and may never have anything resembling a "boss"--this is a legitimate way to play so long as everyone is on the same page).

Because the GM may take on deeper responsibilities and will be facilitating the game which is supposed to be a good time for the participants they may be in a position where more and deeper math is required. Since I think it is reasonable to hold that GM'ing is in general somewhat more complex than playing (that is, the set of GM'ing activities is often--or at least can be--a super-set of the Playing activities) so expecting the GM to do or want to do some heavier math is okay.

Also: the GM will likely be doing prep-work prior to everyone getting together and thus will have more time to do math without "slowing the game down."

Then There Are Optional And Advanced Rules

The two concepts are not the same. An Advanced Rule is one we "expect" you to use after a certain level of familiarity with play. It shouldn't be necessary but it should be used once you're comfortable enough to do so. An Optional rule might never be used or might only be used for some games. An example is tracking ammunition for your weapons. In a lot of fiction (not to mention action movies) the characters are assumed to have essentially infinite ammunition and don't bother checking for reload times.

In other games it could well be necessary and an even fun part of the game. In the Have-Not post-apocalypse dungeon-delving adventure I'm playing in now I track every shot fired. As I fire 3 shots a Round at maximum rate of fire (14 REA) I can eat up a six-shooter in 2 Rounds and then have to reload. As I found an expanded magazine (filled with High Explosive or "HEX" rounds) I get 17 bullets before I have to reload. That was a good piece of treasure.

The "wasteland shotgun" I have now costs 10 Credits every time I fire it. So I have to track ammo for that carefully. This, believe it or not, adds to the fun of playing. The different guns behave differently. If I find a super-revolver I'll have to decide if I want to be switching weapons during combat. I can buy some (Optional) Traits to let me re-holster stuff instantly or dual-wield two pistols. Do I want to invest in that? Maybe.

So these are optional.

What about math is Optional?

The Question Is: How Much Do You Care About Balance?

Before we had the simulator we had to do math and thought-experiments to try to work out "what was balanced." We kind of intuitively understood that negative Damage Mods were a percentage of character cost (or, as I've said, more correctly a multiplier of your defenses) but we couldn't say how much and we had a seriously hard time quantifying that (back then we didn't even see characters as coming in 8 AP levels--a decision which, once we made it, greatly simplified the way we thought about power-brackets).

But we wanted, ideally, for the GM and players to be able to create characters as "abusively" as possible (within the spirit of the specific game) and still have things be reasonable. We didn't want iffy powers like Resisted Attack gas-guns which were cheap shots not because of the nature of poison gas but rather because of holes in the rules (originally a poison was often just rolled against a specific stat so the same gas gun that could knock out a thug could be used pretty effectively on Godzilla--or a bear).

We knew things like "continued burning" or knock-back inducing effects were pretty good but we had no clear ideal how good. So we guessed--and we gave up on the kind of pin-point accuracy that we wanted.

The simulator changed that: the Have-Not game we're playing now is very much like a computer-run MMO. To be certain it's more work than some GMs will want to do--but we're not historically a very go-in-the-dungeon adventuring group ... and this game is fun. The promise of balanced treasure and careful character builds is a different kind of game than we imagined being possible two years ago. It's a vision we like--and gratifyingly, most of the final product is simple enough so that there is no math that a casual player will have to do: we do it up front.

But we're putting the math in the book--the Have Not book will have costing tables for treasure costs (converting AP's worth of gear to credits). This will be math-heavy but it'll only be necessary when the GM is creating their own treasure (we plan to give you a lot of it pre-generated).

So I expect to see some players really interested in balance and getting it right and so one--and some just saying "What the hell, I give the guy +2 CON and +2 AGI vs. Ranged and Built and I don't care what it costs." Both are okay so long as the people involved know what to expect.

-Marco

What's the math?

So most of the time a character being created is given a number of AP and works within that. So if I have 40 AP and I want -8 DM, I can look at the chart and see that it costs me 16 of my 40AP. That's easy.

But suppose I am constructing a character the reverse way: I have 40 AP of stuff already and want to add -8 DM to it, how much is it? It can't be 16 AP--that puts the character total to 56 AP and then the cost is 22 AP.

What's the math?

-Marco

TAP Revised

After a good deal more testing I have the revised list of TAP prices and some testing as to how they "stack together."

It seems that adding TAP defenses is actually weaker than the sum of their parts. I'd noted this before and I'm still not sure why it is--although I suspect that in most cases it is because most of these prevent PEN Doubling (in some cases they prevent PEN altogether) and once you get the bonus for one of those the same deal with the other isn't worth anything (characters with -4 DM and No Pen Doubling are paying twice for what -4 DM practically gives you by itself).

That shouldn't be the whole story--but I think it's at least part of it.

I also got some feedback so here's my responses:

• +1 or +2 AGI is only for the AGI Bonus. It doesn't add to AGI rolls or to AGI for skill purposes.
• +2 CON does NOT by itself increase DP. If you get +2 DP--and you should--you pay for that normally. I did this because I want to isolate the +2 CON cost. In most cases I believe you will get +2 or more DP along with it.
• No Unconscious means, for now, you treat every Damage Result above Dazed as Dazed. That means you tend to die at -5x DP. You will, however, suffer Condition effects (such as negatives to CON rolls). This is the sort of thing you'd give to slasher-killers from the Friday the 13th style movies. We need to revisit this so that there are some more nuanced effects (above Dazed guarantees a Knock-Down or 3-Rounds of down-time unless attacked ... time to run!)
• Mech-Heal is a "cybernetic" power that gives you a charge that removes a damage-result (up to unconscious) and heals a certain number of DP or ADP. It represents the unit taking damage--but "coming back online" quickly. The 1x, 2x, 3x are the number of charges. These need more testing because (a) I didn't do a full suite and (b) These numbers are without regaining any points.
• The grayed out listings are "the same as the 16 AP levels" so they are the minimum costs. While there is some wiggle room there, I'm not going to sell -8 DM for less than 7 AP. I haven't fully vetted the others.
• The yellow-on-yellow listings are where I made some adjustments to the value to better illustrate what I saw during testing. Usually it means the "average value" was a little low by an AP or two at some level of testing and I increased it slightly.

Could You Buy Off This List?
At this point, I think so--yes. It's been tested quite a bit and while I still have some reservations this price list seems to be reasonable.

Will This List Appear In The Game?
It probably won't appear just like this, no. These abilities will usually be part of other things (like Fast Defenses are part of the Fast Company package). As a result the actual prices might be less than the listed values since for in-house designed powers I can test combinations specifically and use their evaluated real-costs.

On the other hand, I don't plan to lose information and the value differences are pretty mild anyway. I suspect that what'll happen is that this kind of chart will appear in the back of the book or on a web-page/tool somewhere.

-Marco

The Expected Build

I've done a little testing of the Giant Attacks list--but our breakthrough on Total AP Cost (TAP) characteristics has had me scrambling. Our formulation of it effects everything from Fast Company to Stretching and beyond (that was how the testing started: I wanted to know what -4 DM was /worth/).

This does bring up one thing though: I am testing with 4 test characters (Mixed DP and Armor, Full DP, Force Field, Full Armor). It's unlikely that we'd see some of these builds in conjunction with some of the TAP abilities. Who would take "Doesn't Take Hurt Condition" and leave themselves at only 14 DP on 64 AP? No one I can think of. That isn't to say it's horrible: the FULL ARMOR rating is usually the best in most of these common tests but when you start adding in a lot of TAP defenses you'll often see FULL DP or Force Field come out the highest victory.

Here's my thought: Some of these abilities -- and this goes for all abilities -- are going to show up where the player thinks they'll be the most effective. While it turns out that within a fairly narrow range of balanced battles Full Armor and Doesn't Take Hurt Condition are within tolerances for reasonable choices we're far more likely to see that on DP-heavy characters.

Does that mean we need to change our testing line up?

The obvious answer is that even if it /did/ I don't think we could--not easily--but the fact is that looking over these various builds it appears to me that the distribution of wins (the best mix of defenses) is, although somewhat skewed towards full armor (half one's DP spent on armor) mixed /enough/ that while there may be one optimal grouping for a given defensive strategy most of the choices a player can make are okay.

-Marco

More TAP Testing

Further tests suggest this:

• The minimum costs for TAP items seem to hover around the 16 AP values. You can't get -8 DM, really, for less than 7 or 8 AP even if you're an 8 AP character. While there are probably cases where this is technically not true it seems for now that this is the safest way to do it.
• The values from the chart are usually within a point or two of the real values. For the 64 AP chart the biggest variation is 4 AP from the tested value to the estimated value. A variance of 1/16th is something I can live with. Nevertheless there are going to be some modifications to the chart by the mentioned point or two in order to more correctly reflect tested values.
• Adding TAP abilities together is, as I said, not simply a matter of adding the costs. It seems it doesn't "quite work that way" and I'm not sure why. Mostly it seems the prices over pay which, I guess, is safer (it doesn't "break the game") but I'd like to have a way to "get it right."

More TAP Abilities

An investigation of our power-list showed there are several more TAP abilities that have yet to be tested. Some of these are:

• CON: this is one of those Defense multipliers. The more AP you are, the more +1 or +2 (about the limit I'll sell) becomes worth)
• Heal: Some characters can "burn a heal" getting them back 10 or 20 DP and negating a Damage Effect (usually limited to Unconscious or below). This is, again, relative to the total AP value of the character.
• Doesn't Take PEN Doubling, Hurt or Injured Condition, PEN damage (treat all as Impact), Doesn't suffer "Unconscious," Doesn't suffer "Above Unconscious." These are components of undead, robot-bodies, slimes, and so on.

-Marco

Hmm ...

While the formula does seem to work /reasonably/ well, it seems that mixing and matching items from it does not. While I need to validate this, it looks like:

• +1 AGI and Full Block both work full vs. Range is worth 8 AP at the 64 AP level
• FAST Defenses (-8 v. PEN, -4 v. IMP) is worth 16 AP.
• Together these are worth 20 AP, not 24 which the math would imply. 

This trend continues for several other elements.

The most probable outcome of this testing is that we'll just sell "packages" of these things properly costed and, if we must, sell the individual elements with a warning. That's if I can't figure out what's going on (clearly the value of +1 AGI which fully applies is "pretty good" by itself--but less good when it's combined with big negative damage mods. In other words, it brings "a lot to the table" but a good portion of that is "already brought" by the -DM's).

-Marco

Triangulation

The methodology used to do the TAP cost stuff was, really, fairly experimental. I had to hope our system was tight enough that I could take a 32pt (or whatever) character, add 1-12 (or whatever) points of Armor and that then the %-Percent-of-Victory (POV) improvement that the characters showed against the herd would match up with the POV increase that something like -8 DM showed.

It turns out, it's looking "pretty close."

I was concerned that when I added, let's say, 8 AP of armor to a 16 AP character I 'd get a 24 AP character who had only 1/3rd of his points in attack. That's /legitimate/ but it's not what we think of as a "common build." I'll recap here that we consider 1/4th AP in attack "Low Damage" (LD) and 1/8th or less AP in attack to be Very Low Damage (VLD) but above 1/4th is "Normal" so these guys were still in the "Normal" range (wherein they get no special breaks on things like extra REA)--just the lower end of it.

But I wasn't sure if that was skewing things or not.

I also knew that there were "floor" costs for these things: no matter what the formula said you couldn't really get -8 DM vs. everything for 1 AP if you were only 8 AP as a character. These abilities have minimum costs I haven't tried to calculate yet.

So my approach was to "triangulate." To do this I'm taking the three herds and modifying their points spent in traditional defenses (Armor, DP, Force Field) and adding in TAP stuff like +2 AGI vs. Ranged, -4 or -8 DM, and so on. I deduct from the points in traditional defenses the estimated cost of the TAP defense and see if the POV changes.

If our estimations are right, it shouldn't. If our tests say that for a 16 AP character -8 DM is worth 5 AP then if the character normally has 8 Armor (for 8 AP) then he should be balanced with 3 Armor and -8 DM. Same difference.

Turns out, while I've only done the 32 and 64 herds thus far, that's turning out to be "about right." If anything some of those values on the chart below are sometimes 1 AP higher (but I've not found anything that's /too/ out of line ... yet).

So it looks like the methodology at the high end works!
-Marco