[Torg] Why 0-21? Or why not ?

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of 
> Alexandre Chessel
> 
> Let me explain : how many cosms do you have in your game ? 6 
> ? 7 ? 8 ? More (damn your game must be awesome) ?

Way back when I was running Torg, I used 13. Eight of those were in play
from the day the Maelstrom Bridges dropped, with a few coming along as the
game progressed. There might have been a couple more that I've forgotten
about.

Six realities would be fewer than the standard Torg starting point.

> The axioms 
> charts is useable only to state if something from a cosm come 
> to work when used in an other.

That's not quite true. There are some mechanics that use the actual axiom
values. They are used to figure out reconnection TNs for new cosms (though
there is a wiggle-factor as well - the WEG method was essentially to apply a
formula, then shift the result up or down as they saw fit). The target
number for an invocation is based on the Spiritual axiom. There might be a
few other oddball mechanics that I don't remember off the top of my head.

> And if two cosms are on the 
> same level, the same tool may be dispendable in one and not 
> in the other, without creating a contradiction (ex : 
> hovercraft in Nippon Tech and Market-Place, same tech level). 
> In that case, if ranks of this charts are only to 
> discriminate between various cosms, one should really do not 
> need more than ten ranks on his/her scale (which come to 
> eleven with the zero ranking).

The difficulty here comes when you try to add a new cosm into an existing
campaign. Suddenly you have a cosm with more advanced tech than your number
5, but not as advanced as your number 6, and how do you rate it? Fractional
axioms? Adjust all your pre-existing material?

Apart from the few cases when the numbers are used directly in mechanics,
the 0-33 scale provides some room for adding in cosms later. I'm pretty sure
that the original Torg design team knew that they would want to add cosms to
Torg later, cosms that they hadn't initially thought of. It's good design to
keep yourself some flexibility for later.

But there's a trade-off. That flexibility comes at a cost of bigger charts
with entries that aren't used initially, and may never be used. It's harder
for players to absorb and for GMs to work with (when they aren't adding new
realities in).

> On the opposite, you could have choose an intermediate 
> reality between Land Below and Aysle. Will the tools 
> dispendable in this reality be very exciting for a player 
> compared to those of Tz Ravok ? A lighter bronze, a sharper 
> knife and so on. Here if there is room, is there an interest ?

The answer is obviously "yes". How many copies of the Infiniverse Updates
were sold? Some of the realities given in them used intermediate values. I'm
sure a lot of people used those realities. (I used at least one myself.)

> Or is 
> it for a Torg 2.0 hypothetic game, suited for a new 
> background and new realities possibly to be created ?

Those new realities were created for the original Torg game. It wasn't about
providing for a hypothetical Torg 2.0 game. Okay, so the writers didn't use
every rank in every axiom, but they couldn't just provide what they would
later need and leave the rest out - they didn't know what they would later
need.

Now that Torg is well and truly dead in terms of professional support and
ongoing development (at least for the foreseeable future) we can each rework
the game to match our own personal visions of Torg. That means that if you
want exactly what you need to provide one level per reality per axiom, and
you know you will never want to add cosms with intermediate axioms, you can
do that, and you won't even have to worry about conversion work to
incorporate new official material. Jasyn can do his 0-21 scale, to fit his
preferred trade-off of future flexibility against usability now. Dominic can
trim down to the 0-30 scale, since that's what he likes.

But mainline Torg wasn't designed for you, Jasyn or Dominic. It was designed
to allow the writers to produce material for all of you, and all the rest of
us too, and hundreds or thousands of players who have never read this list.
They used their judgement, and got something that worked well enough to have
this discussion list still talking about it 20 years later, which is more
than can be said for a lot of other RPGs.

Don't get me wrong, each of the rest of you producing new axiom charts
should be using your judgement too, in an attempt to get a best fit for your
objectives. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that this makes another
system bad or wrong, or that you should talk anyone else into using your
charts if their objectives differ significantly from yours. That could well
do others a great disservice.

There's other ways to represent this sort of data, too, approaches that
would do the whole thing better than a numbered list. The problem is, those
generally don't translate very well to a static, printed page. I could get
wonderful mileage out of a database with entries represented as an ordered
list, and tools linking back to their benchmarks by ID, but few GMs want to
rely on a computer with a database app when running this sort of game. It's
a lovely notion in the abstract, expandable as much as you like without
requiring any extra entries initially, but I'll never actually do it. The
practicalities get in the way.

Travis Hall