OT: Making a Game System (part 2)

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Lokean

I think it essential that you realise how strongly the harmonic mean skews the results towards the low values and, quite importantly, the limit of the harmonic mean.
Consider a situation where a character's vitality cost for acting is the harmonic mean of 100 values, 99 of which are 10, one of which is 1. The harmonic mean is 9.17.
Consider the same thing, but now 99 of those values are one googolplex. The harmonic mean is 100.

This illustrates an important relationship with regards to the the population of a set, its smallest member and its harmonic mean. The maximum value of the harmonic mean of a data set is that of the smallest member multiplied by the population.

thanks!

I do realize the degree to which the harmonic mean skews towards the smallest members of the set, and that is exactly my reason for using it; it creates a strong reverse salience. Reverse salience is where a single component of a system is impeding the performance of the entire system; the term originates from technology studies, where within a system some components are being developed very quickly, while others are allowed to lag behind, and despite all the advances in one technology, the overall system performance does not improved because of the reverse salience of other components in the system.

I liked the principle of harmonic means, and thought they fit a fighting system best. To my understanding, the idea of the harmean in a combat system like mine would be to say that "the percentage of 'attack' contributed by each variable is due to the degree of that variable's operation in the generation of 'attack'." This also means that variables can be weighted to change their degree of operation in attacking. I simply have to decide how much each variable contributes to it, and weight accordingly. Thus in melee, perception might be weighted less than strength and dexterity, for example.