= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (264)
In many artificial rule systems used in games there often turn out to be severe loopholes that allow an appropriate character to drastically increase their abilities and power. Examples include how in Morrowind you can use a series of intelligence potions to drastically increase your intelligence and make yourself effectively invincible or how in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 a low level character can using the right tricks ascend to effective godhood in minutes.
So, two questions which sort of go against each other: First is this evidence that randomized rule systems that are complicated enough to be interesting are also likely to allow some sort of drastic increase in effective abilities using some sort of loopholes? (essentially going FOOM in a general sense). Second, and in the almost exact opposite direction, such aspects are common in games and one has quite a few science fiction and fantasy novels where a character (generally evil) tries to do something similar. Less Wrong does have a large cadre of people involved in nerd-literature and the like. Is this aspect of such literature and games acting as fictional evidence which is acting in our backgrounds to improperly make such scenarios seem likely or plausible?
Can you analogize this to being Turing-complete? One thing esoteric languages - and security research! - teaches is that the damndest things can be Turing-complete. (For example, return-into-libc attacks or Wang tiles.)
Yep. Which is why letting a domain-specific language reach Turing-completeness is a danger, because when you can do something you will soon have to do it. I've ranted on this before.
Idle speculation: I wonder if this is analogous to the intelligence increase from chimps to humans. Not Turing-completeness precisely, but some similar opening into a new world of possibility, an open door to a previously unreachable area of conceptspace.
That is theoretically possible, but ignores Rule Zero. No GM would allow it.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "randomized rule systems"; these games are highly designed and highly artificial, not random.
Not necessarily. I've allowed things like that. There isn't anything WRONG with your adventurers ascending to Godhood, if that's what they find fun. I had it happen to the one meta campaign world to the point where there was a pantheon made up of nothing but ascended characters (either from the PC's, or from NPC's who ascended using other methods.) It made a good way of keeping track of things that had been done and so couldn't be done in future games: (Ah, you can't use Celerity, Timestop, and Bloodcasting to get infinite turns, Celerity was turned into a divine power by your earlier character Neo.).
However, the game sort of runs out of non-hand wavy content at that point, so you just have to make up things like Carnage Endelphia Over-Deities, Mass Produced Corrupted Paragon Dragons, etc.
I even had an official metric: If you can use your powers to beat a single character with a EL of 8 higher (The point at which the chart just flat out says "We aren't giving EXP for this, they shouldn't have been able to do that.") They are ascension worthy.
It seemed more fun than saying "No, you can't!" And eventually I just stopped planning things out far in advance because I expected a certain amount of gamebreaking from my players.
It's like the mental equivalent of eating cake with a cup of confectioners sugar on top though. Eventually, even the players eventually sort of get sick of the sweetness and move onto something else. Once they played around with Godly power for a bit, they usually got tired of it and we moved on to a new campaign in the meta campaign world.
But it does still allow you to say "Remember that time we made our own pantheon of gods who clawed their way up from the bottom using a variety of methods?" Which, as memories go, is a neat one to have.
Fair enough, though I think that's a special case and most GMs wouldn't be willing to go within a mile of that kind of game play.
It sounds amazingly fun though! Kudos!
Ok. But Rule Zero is essentially in this context a stop-gap on what the actual rules allow. The universe as far as we can tell isn't intelligently design and thus doesn't have stop gap feature added in.
The idea here is that even rule systems which are designed to make ascension difficult often seem to still allow it. Still, you are correct that this isn't really at all a sample of randomized rule systems. In that regard, your point is pretty similar to that by sixesandsevens.
The notion of "loopholes" rests on the idea that rules have a "spirit" (what they were ostensibly created to do) and a "letter" (how they are practically implemented). Finding a loophole is generally considered to be adhering to the letter of the law while breaking the spirit of the law.
In the examples you cite, the spirit of the rules is to promote a fun, balanced game. Making oneself invincible is considered a loophole because it results in an un-fun, unbalanced game. It's therefore against the spirit of the rules, even though it adheres to the letter.
What "spirit" would you be breaking if you suddenly discovered a way to drastically increase your own abilities?
Loophole may have been a bad term to use given the connotation of rules having a spirit. It might make more sense in context to use something like "Surprisingly easy way to to make one extremely powerful if one knows the right little small things."
I think you're missing my point, though I didn't really emphasise it. Rule systems are artificial constructs designed for a purpose. Game rules in particular are designed with strong consideration towards balance. Both the examples you gave would be considered design failures in their respective games. The reason they are noteworthy is because the designers have done a good job of eliminating most other avenues of allowing a player character to become game-breakingly overpowered.
You ask "is this evidence that randomized rule systems that are complicated enough to be interesting are also likely to allow some sort of drastic increase in effective abilities using some sort of loopholes?" Most rule systems aren't randomised; if they were they probably wouldn't do anything useful. They're also not interesting on the basis of how complicated they are, but because they've been explicitly designed to engage humans.
Ah, I see. I didn't understand correctly the first time. Yes, that seems like a very valid set of points
My D&D heyday was 2nd ed, where pretty much any three random innocuous magic items could be combined to make an unstoppable death machine. They've gotten better since then.
That of envy avoidance- rising too high too quickly can also raise ire.