Voting on our next RPG

(This is only incidentally about RPGs and mostly about voting methods.)

I took the opportunity of choosing the next RPG my group would play to try out an instant-runoff election. Which has also led me to learning more in-depth about voting methods.

The first thing to say is that this election is a bit weird because there are more candidates than voters. The second thing to say is that any election method used with three or more candidates has to make compromises. There is no perfect solution.

The actual voting was conducted via OpaVote. Each voter had to rank the 11 choices from most favorite to least favorite.

Instant-runoff voting (IRV) was probably a poor choice for this particular application, but it worked for picking the first-place winner. One of the criticisms of IRV is that it can fail to elect the Condorcet winner when there is a Condorcet winner. A Condorcet winner is a candidate who would beat all other candidates in one-on-one contests. In this case, there was a Condorcet winner, and the IRV method choose it.

I then tried to rank the other candidates by removing the winner and running the election again. This seemed to work OK for the first-, second-, and third-place. Then I started to run into one of the limitations of IRV.

Say you have three candidates: A, B, and C. Four of the voters choose A as their first choice, B as their second choice, and C as their third choice: A>B>C. Three of the voters vote: B>C>A. The last three vote: C>B>A.

A wins the first IRV round. One of the first-round losers needs to be eliminated for the second round (the runoff). The losers, however, are tied. If you eliminate B, then C wins. If you eliminate C, then B wins. If you eliminate both B and C, A wins. But B is the Condorcet winner who would beat both A and C in one-on-one races. The OpaVote IRV method chooses to break these sorts of ties randomly, which seems insane to me.

In practice, the larger the number of voters, the less likely you are to run into this. With a small number of voters, however, it becomes more likely.

The problem with just choosing the Condorcet winner is that there isn’t always a Condorcet winner. There are various methods that use Condorcet and then use some sort of “completion rule” if there is no Condorcet winner. Two of the best seem to be ranked pairs (Tideman) and beatpath (Schultz). Both of these also have the ability to rank all the candidates rather than just declaring the first-place winner. Due to my small number of voters, though, even these had to declare a five-way tie for third place.

So, I came up with my own way to break the tie. (Although, no doubt, this is an already known method. Perhaps Condorcet-IRV?) I ranked them by largest number of votes in the most preferred rank. e.g. Two voters picked D&D3e as their first choice, but no voters had chosen any of the others in the tie as their first choice. So, I gave third-place to 3e. (Which was where it placed in my IRV-based ranking attempt too.)

So, the final ranking I came up with is...

1. Toon
2. Shadowrun
3. D&D3e
4. Forbidden
5. Dragon Age
6. Star Frontiers
7. Dragon Warriors
8. Dungeon Crawl Classics
9. Lejendary Adventures
10. Lords of Creation
11. SLASH!

I should also mention the Borda method. I’ve been aware of it, but I’ve never been particularly fond of it. Although I think it might have potential if the scores were calculated differently. It favors “broadly acceptable” winners rather than majority winners. Though there is an argument that that might be appropriate for this case. Here are the Borda results... (There were a couple of ties.)

1. Shadowrun
2. Toon
3. D&D3e and Star Frontiers
4. Dragon Age
5. Dungeon Crawl Classics and Forbidden
6. Dragon Warriors
7. Lejendary Adventures
8. SLASH!
9. Lords of Creation

I’m now much less of a fan of IRV than I was. I think I agree with those who say a Condorcet winner, when there is one, ought to be the overall winner despite the drawbacks of the Condorcet methods. I am undecided on which of the completion rules I prefer.

The ironic thing that kept hitting me while reading about voting methods is that you could have a vote to choose a voting method.

Besides OpaVote, Eric Gorr’s Condorcet calculator was helpful in trying different counting methods.

What is great about C++?

There is plenty that is not great about C++, but I do enjoy the language. So I wonder why. This may be a reason.

A myth from Stroustrup’s article on C++ myths: “For efficiency, you must write low-level code”

You can say that often people over-emphasize efficiency. You can certainly point to places where C++ has failed at this or where the implementations have not yet lived up to the promise. But C++ does demonstrate that you do not always have to trade efficiency for abstraction.

Magic in RPGs: Effects > mechanics

Five problems with magic in D&D

I’ve written about some of the things in this article before, but this is the bit I want to talk about today:

If your first answer was “a person who casts one spell, then has to sleep before re-memorizing it out of a book no matter how many times he's previously cast it”, then you're almost certainly someone that plays Dungeons & Dragons, and for one reason or another never bothered to question why magic works the way it does.

When I think about wizards, what pops into my head? Someone who is reluctant to use magic.

This is possibly the most common theme in stories about magic. Characters who use magic are either evil, reluctant to use magic, or both. Or the whole point of the story was that they should not have used magic when they did.

Too often magic in RPGs is criticized based on its mechanics rather than its effects. I don’t care that the mechanics of magic in Decipher’s Lord of the Rings RPG didn’t match the mechanics of magic in Middle-earth as described by Tolkien in his letters. What matters to me is that they made the effects of the magic system fit what is described in the books.

Now, I’m up for arguments about mechanics that might do a better job of getting the results you want. But first we’ll need to agree that magic in an role-playing game likely serves a very different role than it does in stories.

Quagmire

Jon Peterson’s article on the making of a D&D module at TSR: Quagmire!

I’m not so sure that the process itself was so bad as the execution.

JMAP

FastMail is proposing/developing a replacement for IMAP.

(IMAP is one of the protocols that many e-mail clients use to talk to e-mail servers. For instance, it is how my iPhone gets my e-mail for all my e-mail accounts.)

My first reaction was negative.

First, I’m not convinced that many of the innovations in e-mail are all that useful. Secondly, today’s climate seems so opposed to these kinds of standards, the seem stacked against it.

But IMAP has bigger problems than end-user features. IMAP has technical issues that keep it from being good at the things it does support. They’ve convinced me that JMAP makes sense.

The bigger issue here is that we seem to be moving further and further from interoperable standards. Companies claim that the standards keep them from innovating. But on the whole, I’m not seeing a lot of benefits to end users in trade for this lack of interoperability. Instead, lock-in seems to encourage companies to care less about what is good for their users.

I’m hoping JMAP will be able to buck that trend.

Invalid and ubiquitous; D&D’s key innovation

Jon Peterson’s year-in-review linked to this article about mana that he had contributed to.

How could the concept of mana as a generic spiritual force become invalidated and ubiquitous at the same time?

That kind of thing strikes me as utterly normal.

The first modern role playing game, D&D’s key innovation was to combine the rule systems of tabletop wargaming with the setting of fantasy fiction and the interpersonal improvisation and role-playing that had been percolating in gaming and fan communities for years.

That may be the best, most concise explanation of what D&D did that I’ve ever read. It is clear (especially if you read Jon’s book) that all the elements were in play before D&D. D&D brought them together. Which ought to be unsurprising, because that’s how these kind of things usually happen.

Available capacity

Over at iMore, they’d published a piece titled: “Apple sued for false advertising by plaintiffs that don't understand iPhone digital storage” It seems they’ve since removed or edited it. But I’m responding to it anyway.

Just because it is industry practice to advertise total capacity instead of available capacity doesn’t make it right. It makes zero sense to advertise any capacity other than what’s available for the user’s use. A number that is always some arbitrary size bigger than what is usable doesn’t tell the customer anything anything.

The fact that available capacity varies is no excuse. They just have to advertise a conservative value that they know will always be available for the user’s use. (Available at the time of sale. If a system update would take up all the headroom, the user can be warned about that before updating.) If things change more than expected so that new devices come with less available space than that conservative value, they need to update their specs and advertising accordingly.

Will that be expensive? I’m sure it will be, but cost is not an excuse for not being honest with your customers.

It isn’t just Apple that needs to change. It’s the industry.