A problem with the rules, and a simple fix

[noclue]

Not everything is an Aspect, and not everything involves fate points. Nor should it.

People, can we just STOP finding other ways to suggest that I just use Aspects? I know Aspects are there. I know how they work.

I wasn't suggesting you use aspects.

I was suggesting that the existing mechanic assumes you try to hide as hard as you want not to be found. Not just good enough based on the difficulty. The cognitive dissonance you're experiencing is because you've envisioned a situation where a character is hiding, when no one is searching. Hiding from whom? Successful hiding assumes a finder.

If rolling an uncontested Stealth, maybe your setting up a block to being discovered. Well, that's easy enough on the existing rules. Roll = Block strength. Page 142 suggests that difficulties could lower the block strength.

[TheMouse]

I wasn't suggesting you use aspects. It was in no way suggesting you use aspects.

So when you said, "It seems like the mechanic is trying to make a routine hiding into something more interesting by encouraging spending Fate on Aspects," you were not in fact suggesting the use of Aspects? Not in any way?

The cognitive dissonance you're experiencing is because you've envisioned a situation where a character is hiding, when no one is searching. Hiding from whom?

No, the cognitive dissonance exists entirely because someone is searching for them. The problem only happens when the roll is contested, and the one contesting it is searching for them.

The problem is that an easy difficulty for hiding also makes it sometimes an easy roll for finding the hiding person. If it's easy to hide, how is it easy to find the hiding person? The two things are at odds, because it's a tautology that when it's easy to hide it's difficult to be found.

[noclue]

So when you said, "It seems like the mechanic is trying to make a routine hiding into something more interesting by encouraging spending Fate on Aspects," you were not in fact suggesting the use of Aspects? Not in any way?

Editted above to clarify my point. But, no I wasn't suggesting that Aspects are better than modifiers. You know my views on that already. I was suggesting that rolling for "successful hiding" in a easy to hide location, where your goal is success v. a difficulty is the problem because the player is ignoring the rule that their roll sets their opponent's difficulty later. The game is pretty obviously built for the player to try to maximize their hiding result.

Underneath my view is the idea that it is just as easy to hide in a brightly lit room or a darkened alley, if no one is contesting you. Only when there is a conflict do we find out if you are hidden.

So, before contested roll you can Maneuver or Block. But, hiding is not like breaking into a shed.

[MegaPuff75]

I think the system works well as it is if you think of it like this, If it is hard to hide in a location you need to work harder to stay hidden and as a result you are being more careful and are less likely to make a stupid mistake and be found, whereas if you are hiding in a place where it is easy to hide you can put just as much effort into hiding and be just as hard to find or put in less effort and be more likely to make mistakes, so in this view your stealth roll says how much effort you are putting into trying to hide. If this view still makes the RAW seem off I see no problem with the idea of modifying rolls instead of difficulty.

[TheMouse]

I think the system works well as it is if you think of it like this, If it is hard to hide in a location you need to work harder to stay hidden and as a result you are being more careful and are less likely to make a stupid mistake and be found, whereas if you are hiding in a place where it is easy to hide you can put just as much effort into hiding and be just as hard to find or put in less effort and be more likely to make mistakes, so in this view your stealth roll says how much effort you are putting into trying to hide. If this view still makes the RAW seem off I see no problem with the idea of modifying rolls instead of difficulty.

I don't buy it like that. If it's easy to hide, it should be hard to spot you. If it's hard to hide, it should be easy to spot you. This is tautological. If I were to ask a person on the street for a plain English definition of "easy to hide" which referenced someone searching for you, they'd give me something about it being hard for the person searching for you to find you.

This is just a logic fail for the system. I imagine that it originated in the Evil hat folks not worrying about contested rolls while writing the modifiers rules and/or them not thinking about modifiers when writing the contested rolls rules.

[noclue]

What other skill trappings have this issue?

[MegaPuff75]

Alright if you find my explanation to be a stretch I do have one suggestion on how to simplify the alternative rule while staying a little truer to the spirit of the system. if you attempt to hide you make a stealth check against a set difficulty, shifts above the difficulty modify contested stealth rolls to remain hidden and if you fail the original roll you don't hide in the first place.

[admiralducksauce]

What other skill trappings have this issue?

I was trying to think about this because I look at Stealth specifically as a "if a tree falls in the woods" problem.  If you hide when nobody's looking for you, does it matter if you're hidden?  To me, no, but Mouse isn't asking specifically about Stealth.

What about demolitions work, then?  I could see a base difficulty needed to properly set and arm explosives, but your roll could still be contested if someone wanted to disarm your bomb.

Driving in a chase: You have to make at least, say, a Good roll to make the jump over the ravine, but your roll's contested by the guys trying to catch up to you as well.

So yeah, there are other situations where TheMouse's suggestions work.  And I think his suggestions seem okay BTW.  Just flip the penalties into bonuses, like in percentile systems where a +20% is a bonus if applied to the skill, but a penalty if applied to the roll.

[Masurao]

Well, this has been a interesting discussion so far, to say the least. However, one thing popped up in my mind: do you always have to set a difficulty for hiding? I know it is easier in a dark alleyway than in a brightly lit room (won't start using the A-word, thank you), but it seems a bit silly to roll just to see -if- you can hide in some situations, as opposed as to how well you hide.

Put in another way, for example: why would you have the hider roll against 3 and the searcher against 2, instead of a more simple contested roll against one another? This seems a bit complicated.

Now, I get the OP and I think the solution in there could work well, this question is just for my own benefit, so to speak.

[ways and means]

The way I think it currently works is that the hide roll vs a difficulty determines whether you are hidden and once you are hidden you keep the stealth to decide how well you remain hidden or how well you ambush an enemy. So they keep the roll to speed up the game even though it represent two or three actions.

[TheMouse]

Put in another way, for example: why would you have the hider roll against 3 and the searcher against 2, instead of a more simple contested roll against one another? This seems a bit complicated.

There's no reason to adjust the difficulty of more than one person. The other will just default to a +0 difficulty. So it won't be one person rolling against +2 and the other rolling against +3; one will roll against +0 and the other +1.

And it really isn't that complicated. It would work out like this:

GM: OK. You're in the dark room and the thug is coming toward you. What do you do?
Player: Well, I'm hurt, so I don't really want to fight. I'm also out of fate points. I'm just going to find a dark spot that's out of the way and hide.
GM: Okay. It's pretty dark in here. So I'm going to give you a -2 difficulty to hide. The default is 0, so your diff is -2. The thug rolls against 0.
*Player and GM roll dice*
Player: Okay. I rolled +2. +2 -(-2) is +4, so I've got 4 shifts.
GM: He rolled +3. +3-0 is +3, so he's got 1 fewer shift than you. He slows down at one point and looks around, then mutters something under his breath, but it's pretty clear he didn't actually see you.

The most complicated step in the whole thing is subtracting one integer from another, and it's possible that they're both negative.

Okay, I've just now considered something, and I feel silly for only getting this now: What if you both fail? There aren't negative shifts. So I've just now come up with an advantage to just adding something to the roll of the advantaged person.

Reworking that example, it'll work out like this:

(The same up until the player and GM roll)
Player: Okay. I rolled a +2. Add 2 for the darkness, and I'm at 4
GM: He rolled +3, so you have him by 1. (Etc, etc.)

[babel2uk]

To be fair, I wonder whether the Hiding rules are just badly worded in the rulebook.

I've checked out a couple of other Fate games and neither seems to impose an initial difficulty on the roll as such. It's just treated as a straight comparison of the hider's stealth roll vs the searcher's perception. In Spirit of the Century modifiers are applied directly to the hiding roll:

+4 for Pitch Black, no visibility
+2 for Darkness, Smoke, Thick Fog
0 for Dim Lighting
-2 for Good Lighting
-4 for Bright Lighting

These bonuses can be modified further by small things that may be taken into account (-1 or +1 depending on what the small thing is). SOTC actually goes as far as to say that you don't begin to make any sort of stealth roll unless there is someone looking.

That said, having the difficulty as presented in the rulebook does have echoes of the Evocation rules, where your roll not only tells you whether you draw the power successfully, but also how well you target it, so maybe it's intentional.

[TheMouse]

The more I think of it, the more I think that this whole issue is because of the desire to avoid stating anything as a penalty to a roll. If penalties are expressed as an increase to difficulty, you don't have to penalize a roll.

The irony of this is that it creates problems with contested rolls, where you always have the option of expressing penalties as a bonus to the opposition. So if the rules for modifying difficulties stated that they adjusted static difficulties, but gave a bonus to the advantaged side in contests, this would work itself out in most instances. (The exception being when more than two people are competing, which gets a little awkward, but would be workable none the less.)

[Todjaeger]

I was trying to think about this because I look at Stealth specifically as a "if a tree falls in the woods" problem.  If you hide when nobody's looking for you, does it matter if you're hidden?  To me, no, but Mouse isn't asking specifically about Stealth.

What about demolitions work, then?  I could see a base difficulty needed to properly set and arm explosives, but your roll could still be contested if someone wanted to disarm your bomb.

Driving in a chase: You have to make at least, say, a Good roll to make the jump over the ravine, but your roll's contested by the guys trying to catch up to you as well.

So yeah, there are other situations where TheMouse's suggestions work.  And I think his suggestions seem okay BTW.  Just flip the penalties into bonuses, like in percentile systems where a +20% is a bonus if applied to the skill, but a penalty if applied to the roll.

I pretty much still look at it as a 'tree falls in the forest" type issue.  Perhaps I just haven't really encountered the issue Mouse is concerned about, or perhaps I have a workaround which I just automatically have been doing.   

With regards to both examples of a setting and then disarming a bomb, and a car chase involving jumping a ravine...  From my perspective, neither of those are really opposed roles.

Setting a demolitions charge would be a straight difficulty to set (properly), as well as a straight difficulty to successfully disarm said charges as well.  The number of shifts of success the person setting the charges achieves would dictate how effective the charge is once it goes off, assuming that even happens (either by failing to successfully set the charges or being disarmed).  It is also quite possible that a very poor roll while setting the charges could cause them to go off prematurely, either trapping the person setting the charges, or perhaps just turning them into chum. 

The reason (from my perspective at least) that the difficulty to disarm wouldn't increase is because if someone is using a normal type charge, there are only so many components involved and only so many ways they can be arranged.  A basic example would be something like dynamite, a blasting cap, battery/electrical source, and a trigger to complete the circuit.  Unless the person setting the charge goes out of their way to make it more complicated, adding redundant items like multiple triggers, auxiliary electrical sources, etc to it more difficult to disarm, then it should just be a straight difficulty to successfully disconnect some of the items to disarm the charge.  If the person setting the charge wishes to make it more difficult, they of course could choose to do so, prior to attempting the skill roll for Demolitions, which would have an increased difficulty because of the extra work the person is attempting with the device.  My reasoning behind this increase in the difficulty to set the charge initially is because by adding extra items to the charge to make it more difficult to stop/disarm, there is a greater chance for something to be set incorrectly and either not have the charge go off, or have it go off at a time when the person setting it doesn't want it to (like when it's in their hands...)

With the car chase and having to jump a ravine, there are two parts to that.  If both the chaser and chasee are traveling a path which forces them to jump a ravine, the ravine is an obstacle which both parties will encounter.  Presumably the chasee has the head start, and would encounter the ravine obstacle first.  If they pass their Drive skill test, then the chasee can proceed past the ravine, if they fail, then they would most likely have some sort of car wreck and the appropriate results from that.  The chaser, once they come into contact with the ravine obstacle, would also have to pass the appropriate Drive test, whether they have to jump it to continue on, or stop short, whatever is required.  Now if the chasee fails the Drive test and the chaser passes, then yes the chaser should be able to 'catch' the chasee since they would most likely be crashed in the ravine.  However, if the chasee passes the Drive test but the chaser fails, then the chasee should be able to escape easily since the chaser is the one who crashed in the ravine.  It's also quite possible that both parties ended up crashing in the ravine, which would mean that the chaser did catch up to the chasee, but either group is likely in any condition to do anything about it.

-Cheers

[TheMouse]

Forgot to mention:

No, my issue isn't exclusively with Stealth. It's just that I realized the problem was there while reading the section on how Stealth works, and it's a convenient example.

I mean, it being dark is bad for spotting people and good for hiding. It's not like chasing someone up a hill, where the slope is bad for both people.

And there is of course the issue where there isn't a general rule for modifying difficulties when making opposed rolls. Such things logically exist in general, but it explicitly exists in regards to hiding and light modifiers. I'm sure I could think of other situations that could benefit from this, but with this one I can point to page reference numbers that apply to it.