well a GM just said in our forum:
It's more about the fact everything else in BB is measured by a word, rather than a numerical value...so its just moving the enthusiasm system to be consisentent with that.
I'm not a big fan of the new system.
It makes yet another scale of words to learn. Moreover it's a real pain when you wander on foreign forums who use different languages.
I think it gives less informations than numbers, if there wasn't the colors, I would be completly lost.
It's kind of odd, to hear peoples thinking that words are clearer than numbers. I think numbers are also part of the language, and that they convey a lot of information in a compact way. even if you haven't a Ph.D in Maths.
- The linearity. everyone can see the difference between
4,5,6, and
4,5,11. Whereas it's not so easy with
ready, encouraged ,focused and
ready encouraged, inspired.- The order relationship. if I see the word
inspired, focused, motivated, , I would be puzzled if someone asked me to sort them in order. But show me
11, 7, 9, the order relationship is obvious even for a child in elementary school.
Moreover the relative position of the number compared to the complete range is obvious. If you have a player with 8 in Rebound, on a scale from 1 to 20 the meaning is quite clear. Now if I say this guy is
Strong in rebound , this could be true in D.V, but in D.I, this guy will not be so strong.
- The granularity (or resolution), if you make a scale from 1 to 5, and another from 1 to 20. You obvioulsy increase the information's accuracy. But for word qualifiers it doesn't work so well. If I have a scale made of :
poor, average, goodThe meaning is obvious, I could add some qualifiers, and it will increase the information, like
atrocious, poor, average, good, excellentBut, if I continue adding words, at one point the resolution stop to increase, and the information get more confusing rather than more accurate. Because at some point you have to borrow qualifiers from different families, some refering to a quantity other to quality or other fields.
As for the beginner argument, I really don't understand it. I started BB 5 seasons ago, and I remenber the difficulty I had with the player ratings words. After a couple of seasons, once I had associated the words with their relative number, it started making sense. Yet today I don't know the word for any rating above 14. (except legendary, but it's not really usefull in practice).
It reminds me of Role Playing Games. In the beginning, in the late 70, characters where described by a set of numerical attributes. Later in the 90, numbers were regarded as a liability for the "roleplaying" side of the game, and attempts were made to use words (or other weird things) instead of numbers. I'm not much in RPG now, so I cannot judge the real impact. But having taken a look at the recent and popular Pathfinder System, it seems that numbers still have a lot for them.
Anyway, Basketball is a game full of numbers. Management games, also use a lot of numbers.
In the end I will have to translate the words to numbers, especially if I need to know what
l motivated will be if I play TIE and gain 33%.