No, we’re not planning to tell you the mathematical relationship between armor or accuracy and observable game outcomes
You wouldn’t have that in reality either, and in reality, the relationship would be even more complicated. I think a fair compromise would be to give you a simplified relationship like “+1 armor increases the damage it can absorb by 20%” when it is more complicated than that (min/max damage, non-linearity).
Many years ago, I used to think it would be great if a game gave you just the information that you would have had “in reality” and asked you to make decisions based on what “would realistically work”.
After trying to play a bunch of games this way, I no longer think this is a sensible approach. Game rules necessarily ignore vast swathes of reality, and there’s no a priori way to know what they’re going to model and what they’re going to cut. I end up making a bunch of decisions optimized around presumed mechanics that turn out not to exist, while ignoring the ones that actually do exist, because the designer didn’t happen to model exactly the same things that I guessed they’d model.
Fundamentally, losing a game because you made incorrect guesses about the rules is Not Fun. (For me.)
My current philosophy is that rules should usually be fully transparent, and I’ve found that any unrealism resulting from this really doesn’t bother me. My primary exception to this philosophy is if the game is specifically designed so that figuring out the rules is part of the game, which I think can be pretty neat if done well, but requires a lot of work to do well.
In most of the games I’ve played where the rules were not transparent, it didn’t look (to me) like they were trying to build gameplay around rules-discovery, or carefully calculating the optimum amount of opacity; it looked (to me) like they just ignored the issue, and the game (in my opinion) suffered for it.
Also, “in reality”, if there were important stakes, and you didn’t know the rules, you’d probably do a lot of experimentation to learn the rules. You can do this in games, too, but in most games this is boring and I’d rather just skip to the results.
You wouldn’t have that in reality either, and in reality, the relationship would be even more complicated. I think a fair compromise would be to give you a simplified relationship like “+1 armor increases the damage it can absorb by 20%” when it is more complicated than that (min/max damage, non-linearity).
Many years ago, I used to think it would be great if a game gave you just the information that you would have had “in reality” and asked you to make decisions based on what “would realistically work”.
After trying to play a bunch of games this way, I no longer think this is a sensible approach. Game rules necessarily ignore vast swathes of reality, and there’s no a priori way to know what they’re going to model and what they’re going to cut. I end up making a bunch of decisions optimized around presumed mechanics that turn out not to exist, while ignoring the ones that actually do exist, because the designer didn’t happen to model exactly the same things that I guessed they’d model.
Fundamentally, losing a game because you made incorrect guesses about the rules is Not Fun. (For me.)
My current philosophy is that rules should usually be fully transparent, and I’ve found that any unrealism resulting from this really doesn’t bother me. My primary exception to this philosophy is if the game is specifically designed so that figuring out the rules is part of the game, which I think can be pretty neat if done well, but requires a lot of work to do well.
In most of the games I’ve played where the rules were not transparent, it didn’t look (to me) like they were trying to build gameplay around rules-discovery, or carefully calculating the optimum amount of opacity; it looked (to me) like they just ignored the issue, and the game (in my opinion) suffered for it.
Also, “in reality”, if there were important stakes, and you didn’t know the rules, you’d probably do a lot of experimentation to learn the rules. You can do this in games, too, but in most games this is boring and I’d rather just skip to the results.