Geometry Game Challenge

[Andrew Martin]

Most RPGs seem to be arithmetic intensive, eg, add attribute to skill add roll 1DX, subtract modifier and compare to difficulty.

What about a RPG that uses geometry or other forms of maths or physics as a significant component of the game system design or setting?

[ChapinoMuse]

I see you probably got this idea from my Charachter Triangle post, so for my submission to this thread, refer to that one. And, yeah, I wonder what else you could using geometry, I mean when I though of that triangle thing, it seems their could be all sort of way to use geometry.

[Mock]

I vaguely recall someone talking about using quadratic, cubic, and quartic curves to represent something in their game, but I don't remember where--and it's pretty arcane, as I recall.

Another person toyed with the idea of using it as the basis for magic.

Riffing on Chapino's idea (full credit to him). What if:

You consider the character to have three primary characteristics, Mind, Body, and Spirit. These are three points on a triangle.

We know the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees, but the angles can be pretty much anything.

Now, take the measure of the angle for each characteristic to represent the relative strength of that characteristis. A person with powerful focus in Body would have a large angle corresponding to Body, but that would necessarily narrow the angles available to Mind and Spirit.

Or a wide angle could represent not large ability, but breadth of ability, but not depth, while a narrow angle shows a deep focus in a few abilities. It might be useful to narrow the range of abilities by limiting it to a few angle configurations, though.

If you have a 30-60-90 triangle, for instance, corresponding to Body-Mind-Spirit, you could have a person with a weak-ish body, a sharp mind, and an extremely keen spirit. Thus, the classic wizard. Ta-da!

-Mock

[ChapinoMuse]

Wow, people liking a idea of mine, cool.

[Patrick Chipman]

Tch. Most gamers (and people in general) are bad enough at basic math; adding more complicated math is likely to cause severe pain up to and including spontaneous head explosions. ;)

However, I experimented with this a bit in a game system I was working on briefly. Characters were described by a pentagon (Intellect, Knowledge, Power, Grace, and Magic). Each statistic was rated from 0-10. The shape of the pentagon wasn't important, but when one was "linked" to another character, the percentage efficacy of the connection was based on something approximating the deviation of the attributes, like so:

100-[(I1-I2)^2+(K1-K2)^2+(P1-P2)^2+(G1-G2)^2+(M1-M2)^2]

There was more that I could have played with, of course. The same sort of system could have been used to determine action success numbers -- for instance, (S1-S2)^2 could be the percentage likelihood that an action will succeed for the person with the higher statistic. Of course, this introduces an exponential system which may not fit with reality, and also poses some problems of math complexity. ;) There's also the issue that this doesn't really give any advantages over a more "standard" game system, but it is interesting from a mathematical perspective. ;)

[leviathan]

*chokes on the math* I'm sueing! You endangered my life! *coughs* (;

~Lev~

[Harlequin Jones]

Mock,

That triangle thing is a pretty neat idea. I don't know how practical it would be, but it's neat.

How to represent someone who is better than someone else at everything? A larger triangle?

By the way, it was probably me who was guilty of using the words "quadratic" and "cubic" in his game system. I guess I'm just a geek. :)

Fortunately, the players of said system do not actually have to know what the words mean in order to play, nor do they have to know how to do anything more complicated than addition and multiplication.


HJ

[Mock]

Well, thank you.

You have a good question--since there's no way to push the angles beyond a sum of 180, we'd have to look at the length of a side also. But to preserve the angles, all the sides have to increase correspondingly. It's a possible method.

Maybe the length of the opposite side would have an impact--indicating the number of skills available in that major area, or setting a difficulty, or something.

I'm not really sure where to go with this. Chapino suggested using a triangle inscribed in a circle, rotating the triangle to an appropriate point to determine modifiers for actions (like the artist color wheels you can buy in an art store--rotating the wheel to the a color gives you a wealth of information on the color). That might be more fun to do than calculating angles and measuring lines.

-Mock

[Mock]

Originally posted by Patrick Chipman
There's also the issue that this doesn't really give any advantages over a more "standard" game system, but it is interesting from a mathematical perspective. ;)

Natch. We're just exploring a nifty idea--if we discover the Next Generation of game mechanics, it'll probably be by accident. I don't think this would be more intuitive for anyone than simply assigning numbers to traits and rolling dice (in fact, this is just another way to assign numbers to traits).

[Andrew Martin]

I was hoping that the "obtuse", "normal" and "acute" description could be slipped in some how.

[Patrick Chipman]

Originally posted by Mock


Natch. We're just exploring a nifty idea--if we discover the Next Generation of game mechanics, it'll probably be by accident. I don't think this would be more intuitive for anyone than simply assigning numbers to traits and rolling dice (in fact, this is just another way to assign numbers to traits).

When I said this, I was actually referring to my semi-exponential system -- you know, the one that nearly killed leviathan? ;) The triangle mechanic is interesting, but I'm not sure how it's different in any way from BESM, which does the same thing (3 attributes arranged, at least on the 1st Edition character sheet, in a triangle). As an alternative that uses percentiles, however, your triangle idea is quite useful.

[Steven Sweeney]

Originally posted by Mock
Well, thank you.

You have a good question--since there's no way to push the angles beyond a sum of 180, we'd have to look at the length of a side also. But to preserve the angles, all the sides have to increase correspondingly. It's a possible method.

Maybe the length of the opposite side would have an impact--indicating the number of skills available in that major area, or setting a difficulty, or something.

-Mock

Have the angle determine breadth of experience - larger angle, more potential skills, while having the length of the line determine the die to use - 4 cm, d4, 6 cm, d6, etc.

Now I'm not sure whether or not it's good to have a large die or a small die. That depends on the system goals.

[Andy K]

Actually, this all gave me a few ideas for a new chargen system.

Two words: "Radar Graph"

I'll putz around with it and post the results on the board later...

-Andy

[Steven Sweeney]

I took a second look at my post up there and realized the angle and the length of the line would determine one another; I'm certain there's some mathematical formula you can use to determine this, but oh my god... my mind is officially boggled.

I vote we christen this Angle: the Shattering.

[Andrew Martin]

Steven Sweeney wrote:
> I vote we christen this Angle: the Shattering.

But! Are we sure that Chapino won't mistake this for a WW game based on the Angels being shut out of heaven because of the Shattering of the pathways between heaven and earth? :D

[Deathlok]

I think the relationship between sides and angles is concrete, assuming the triangle is inscribed in a circle. Sin-Cos-Tan and all that. You could possibly vary the size of the circle to represent all-around superiority, but that seems to be doing it the hard way.

What we need is a game where the difficulty of actions is determined by the attributes of the person in question. Maybe you're playing Gods, and the amount of attention you focus on one aspect of the universe (which has a 95 degree rating) necessarily limits your other pursuits, but your 95 is the same as all Gods with a 95. Or you could subtract the rating of the angle in question from 180 to get the target for a d100 roll-over system, but allow characters to spend experience to lower the 180 to 179, then to 178 (don't know what to do when the target # for the highest skill gets into 0 and negatives... Maybe start above 180 to delay the problem, and allow for more variation?)

Josh Morrow