Sunday, May 30, 2021

Entropy as a Character-Generation Currency

Had a conversation with my father today about character generation, random stats vs point buy, and Traveller character generation (including how death-in-chargen leads to intra-party balance in expectation more readily than allowing/expecting characters who fail survival rolls to be played in the company of those who passed all survival rolls).  While discussing point buy schemes and how it's sort of hard to put a number on the value of an 18, but that rolling dice has the problem of "auditability" (did they actually roll these stats?) I got to thinking...

Even if you don't want to actually obey dice, you can expect results that deviate from expectation to a certain degree, and that's a property that you can check.  Ability scores occur with certain probabilities.  Given a set of stats, one could compute the probability of that set occurring.  Depending on the sort of campaign one is running, one could establish bounds on the improbability of each set of chosen stats.

In information theory, there's a concept of "surprisal" in the occurrence of an event, which roughly quantifies how surprising it is given the probability of its occurrence (also called self-information).  If an event occurs with probability p, then its surprisal is -lg(p).  So given the probability of each ability score roll, we can compute the total surprisal of a set of stats.  And one nice property of logarithms of probability is that when you would multiply probabilities, adding their logarithms is equivalent (eg, 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25.  lg(0.5) = -1, lg(0.25) = -2, so lg(0.5) + lg(0.5) = lg(0.25)).  Being able to work with them additively rather than multiplicatively is a desirable property for something like a point-buy system.

Stat% chanceProbabilitySelf-information (bits)Normalized self-informationScaled and rounded self-information (deci-bits)
30.460.00467.764.7648
41.390.01396.173.1732
52.780.02785.172.1722
64.630.04634.431.4314
76.940.06943.850.858
89.720.09723.360.364
911.570.11573.110.111
1012.50.125300
1112.50.125300
1211.570.11573.110.111
139.720.09723.360.364
146.940.06943.850.858
154.630.04634.431.4314
162.780.02785.172.1722
171.390.01396.173.1732
180.460.00467.764.7648

So we could use these scaled surprisal values as points during character generation.  But a set of all 10s and 11s is surprisingly unsurprising; an average set rolled on 3d6 looks more like 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 than like all 10s and 11s.  If you wanted to model stat-lines at this level of surprise, a reasonable approach might be that you get a 7 in any one stat and 8 deci-bits to spend on the other 5, with the option to take a 9 to get a credit of 1 deci-bit.  Realistically, this means you get either a 14 or two 13s and the rest are 10s or 11s (unless you take the 9, which buys you a 12).  Might also want to add a rule that you should have close to the same number of 11s and 10s.

Honestly 13, 13, 11, 11, 10, 7 is a very playable set in B/Xy games.  I could absolutely see giving new players pregens with this array.

But going from there to higher-entropy statblocks seems sort of tricky.  If you let players take a 3 to buy an 18 (or a 6 and a 7 to buy a 16), their stats are "in balance", but more surprising /  less natural / less likely than a statblock with an 18 and a 10 would be!

Average stats of 4d6 drop 1 are more like 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16 - 34 deci-bits with the option to take a 9 for one more, I suppose?  Four 14s and a pair of 12s is nothing to scoff at in 3.x, while in B/X 16, 13, 13, 13, 11, 10 (or 12, 9) is a very solid set.

Perhaps it would make more sense to compute the probability (and then surprisal) of each ability score modifier band (per game-system), so that a 13 and a 14 are more-or-less equivalent?

Maybe the real problem here is that we're computing surprisal of each score in isolation, when maybe we should be computing the surprisal of the whole set.  Having an 18 as the highest score in a set isn't really that surprising - 6 stats, each with a 1-in-216 chance of being an 18, means a 1-in-36 chance that at least one is an 18, which is the same probability as having a 16 in any particular score.  But I'm not actually familiar enough with information theory to say if I would need something more complex like joint/mutual entropy (but it seems like there shouldn't be any mutual information between stats in a rolled character, because the stat rolls are independent, so you should just be able to add the self-informations together to get its aggregate information).  So I think this line of thought, evaluating the whole set of stats together, would take more thinking.

In any case, an aside - if we're considering using surprise as a currency in character generation, we could also use it to buy "weird stuff".  Want to play a lawful drow, or the lost son of the rightful king, or a balrog?  Fine, but those are extraordinarily rare and that costs entropy that you then aren't spending on your stats.  If elves are half as common among adventurers as humans in your setting, then being an elf is about 10 deci-bits of surprise.  And then maybe we can get rid of stat minimums for demi-humans (which currently impose roughly that effect - three-quarters of stat-lines qualify to be dwarves, and three-quarters qualify to be elves; call it 4 deci-bits).

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Chesterton on Letting the Dice Fall Where They May (but Unseriously)

Continuing with Orthodoxy (chapter 7):

I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing... For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable.

which reminded me variously of illusionism (where the results aren't real), and storygames (where the players are authorially unbound), and of discussions of agency.

On the other hand,

Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness... Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

which reminded me of this post of mine, where I concluded "Perhaps the problem with my previous approach to RPGs was taking things entirely too seriously."  And that is not something I have remedied, really.  It reminded me also of Lurkerablog's excellent post on tiki and early D&D:

Thinking about it, the slow evaporation of the Tiki mood from DnD just might be what defines the edge between James Malichewski’s Golden and Silver ages. When DnD got its visual style defined as heavy metal it acquired metal’s earnestness – the wargamer tourists of the 70s gave way to a new player base of DnD natives who took it all very seriously and wanted to know just how heavy that axe was. Kitsch, whimsy, a lack intensity – these became signs of poor commitment.

It is an easy error to make, for irrevocability to become serious, for it to turn to grave plotting to limit one's risks.  But I do think my favorite ACKS players have been the ones who took irrevocability in stride, for whom it was not a deterrent to action.  "Ha, told you we'd survive!" (or "that was a really funny death, it's going to be hard to top that")  I don't know how I would encourage such an attitude though.

Maybe part of the problem is that ACKS takes itself seriously.  That's part of why it's good; because it was taken seriously during its creation.  But it's not without its costs.