Subject: MN: Re: Year 2, Week 43 - Voting Results for Year 2, Week 42

From: "Wayper, Paul" <WayperP@p...>
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 17:23:27 +1000

On Wednesday, March 03, 1999 7:51 PM, Kevan Davis
[SMTP:kevan@z...] wrote:
> Bad Thing, to these retinae - it seems too much of a strange and
> counter-intuitive abstraction, and has too much of an impact on all the
> rules that require proximity. Some sort of distanced attack might be
> worthwhile (I've long considered a "gun" that can only fire along
> straight sections of track), but sweepingly making a huge number of
Actions
> long-distance seems a little too daunting.

I don't know about that. I personally think the costing, especially in the
second draft, was much steeper. For a start, you could always hide around
junctions in the track if afraid of being Extend-attacked. Secondly, the
cost of hitting someone gets progressively larger as they get further away,
fairly quickly - you know, after all, who is going to be more of a threat,
even in this scenario.

Thirdly, the effect of extending actions was not dissimilar to the
abilities of a player with a good setup - with an LV of ten you can hit a
lot of targets, and with more tokens you can often hit things with
straddles, striles, compass wormholes, and all sorts of other deviousness. 
So why, if we allow this sort of thing, is it so difficult for people to
grasp the idea of extending the range of an action.

Personally, I don't think of the IMCS rules being quite as limited as we
do. Some actions require adjacency, some require colocation, some require
just having passed through, some don't care at all. There are good reasons
for some of those, but sometimes I think it's been a bit arbitrary. I
think the IMCS would have you able to choose how far from you the target
was, and a costing scale being brought into play when choosing targets
further from you.

How about this for a proposal:

***

Actions may have a Target Class (from 1 to 7), which defines the location
of the Target with respect to the Player performing the Action. Each
Target Class includes all Target Classes with numbers lower than it (i.e.
Target Class 2 allows the Target to be adjacent to and at the same location
as the Player). Target Classes have the following meanings:

* Class 1 requires colocation of the Target.
* Class 2 requires adjacency of the Target.
* Class 3 requires the Target to be at any Station which the Player's Piece
has passed through during that Move.
* Class 4 requires the Target to be on the same Line as the Player's Piece,
excluding on Line Segments that are unreachable without either changing
Line Direction or Line.
* Class 5 requires the Target to be in the same Zone.
* Class 6 requires the Target to be in the same Quadrant.
* Class 7 allows the Target to be anywhere.

Players may Boost the Target Class of an Action to increase the Target
Class of that particular Action. The cost of the Boost is equal to the
factorial of the number of extra Classes by which the Player wants to Boost
the Action, plus one, in Red and Blue Tokens. (The factorial of a number
is the multiple of all numbers between one and that number - i.e. the
factorial of 5 is 5*4*3*2*1, or 120.) For instance, to Boost an action by
one Target Class, two Red tokens and two Blue tokens must be paid; to Boost
an action by three Target Classes would require 24 Red and 24 Blue Tokens. 
This cost is paid in addition to the cost of the Action itself.

***

The factorial cost is just an idea - rather steep, but this may be to some
people's liking. Each Action would merely need to specify which Target
Class it was; targetless Actions (such as [Gold to Blue]) wouldn't require
a TC.

The point here is that this allows a lot more freedom of action, at a
suitable cost. It's always going to be cheaper to go there directly and do
it, but the above proposal has three important effects:

1) It means that the more general TCs imply the more specific, which (I
feel) makes a lot of sense.
2) It standardises the way you choose targets, and moves more information
about the Action into the Actions Table of 1.7.2, which should also make a
fair bit of sense.
3) It allows you to choose a more distant target by paying a cost, which I
also feel makes a lot of sense.

But anyway, I think you get the idea now.

> Might I ask the same of the Midas Clamp? Mere poor costing, or was the
> basic idea too terrifying for some of you?

I think I voted 'For' that one...

Paul Wayper -- DPI ITS Computer Systems Officer
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