[generic] Compass and straightedge whining

[Fnord]

As the guy who wrote the sheet, I figure I should speak up here.

I'll just point out that if the mechanic sucked as much as the
undercurrent is starting to sound like, it wouldn't have been used so
often that it is nearly the only lockpicking mechanic some of the
undergrads have ever seen. I know at least one undergrad that has
developed surprising speed and skill with this mechanic, and I don't
think she had it to this degree in high school (I could be wrong). I
chuckle every time another GM team rips my greensheet verbatim from
the one I wrote for Eye of the Needle.

That brings me to another point. When writing L5 (as well as the Eye
testruns) I was pretty unimaginative with the constructions. They
could all be found in the figures on the back of the greensheet, or
derived trivially (you could find a 30/60/90 triangle, and figure out
how to make an equilateral triangle from there, or maybe it was the
other way around). K-O had all sorts of weird crap that one might
theoretically have to do to break a lock - 3/4/5 triangle, circle
inscribed in isosceles triangle - and sure, while I can do those with
a little thought, I think maybe the lock writers lost sight of the
(originally intended) point of the mechanic - it's not a puzzle, it's
a timewaster, and so if there is stuff that is likely to be a puzzle
they should have made it into the xfig. (Or maybe they wanted it to be
a puzzle, in which case you people who don't like Jake and Joe puzzles
can be even more expansive in your list of things you don't want to
put up with from that particular GM team. "Any puzzle. Whatsoever. If
I have to rub two brain cells together and it's not about lying to
someone I don't want to do it.")

Re: cumbersome props - One time when I was playing a character with
picks I had this plasticized green pouch like 3rd-graders use for
their pencils that I stored them in, I think I got it at Verdes
pre-game, maybe it was CVS. $1.50 said I had no holes in my pockets.

I've heard one good argument against compass and straightedge, that
being "on Friday there were not enough to go around". That
blows. There's really no way to fake it without an actual compass and
straightedge. This is solvable by the GMs having their crap together,
but that is highly variable based on GM team.

There is something appealing to me about having two separate pieces of
stuff in my hands to mechanic doing something to a door or lock with
two separate pieces of stuff (pick and torquewrench). I also think
that the tools should be the mechanic, not the lock (this is in
response to Greg's suggestion about some sort of Operation game or
other "disarm the lock electronic toy") - when the mechanic is
performed by the lockpicks and not the lock itself, it's a lot easier
to scale the locks for either durability (placing 3 locks in every MIT
basement for a 10 day) or number (30 locks in a high-action one-night).

Re: difficulty of the mechanic (Jan's post):

> More to the point, ruler & compass construction isn't actually a
> part of every high school geometry curriculum (I get the feeling the
> GMs assumed that it was).

That's true, I had. I mean, you learn it in 7th grade or something and
you figure everyone learns it, especially when you're behind on the
math power curve. Maybe that's one of the things they cut out to make
room for the "cool kids" Calculus II classes by senior year.

> Meanwhile, a random selection of CS Ph.D.'s at a loose end (read:
> co-workers at 5PM yesterday) were unable to reconstruct the pentagon
> construction from the rules, even though one of them specifically
> said he'd learned that construction in high school.

I'd like to believe that this is relevant but I just can't. The most
charitable thing I can say is this: if you got saddled with the
lockpicking mechanic unwillingly, and you're having trouble with the
constructions, grab a GM and have them go over the things with you for
30 minutes. If the GM team is using this mechanic they had better have
someone who can perform it. (If they don't, leave.)

I'd respond more fully to Ken's recent post but it looks like points 1
and 2, whatever they were, were cut out of his email. Points 3 and 4
are valid, with the small exception that if the GM team is on the
stick, they can buy "good compasses", "crappy compasses", "long hard
rulers" and "short limp rulers" and put those into game as varying
grades of lockpicking tools. I'd like to suggest that you don't really
*need* a character-skill boost when you have varying player skill in a
mechanic, but that is a religious war just waiting to re-occur.

In closing I'd like to point out that I haven't seen a suitable
suggestion for a replacement mechanic that is better than a numeric
stat or coin-flipping that doesn't leave detritus all over the
institute. It's only whining until you give an alternate suggestion.

   - Jim
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| Jim Waldrop(KB1DBZ)		W.617.xxx.xxxx		Researcher         |
| jlwfnord at mit.edu  		H.617.492.0941		MIT Auto-ID Center
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