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Context Switching Paralysis, or Why we Will Always Have the Thief Debate
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8750553" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I listened to a Matt Mercer pod-cast on the rule of cool, and I thought Matt's answer was characteristically thoughtful. He described Rule of Cool as something that he situationally applied to new players that didn't know the rules and who therefore didn't know what a character ought to have in order to perform some task reliably. So for a reasonably high-level character that wants to do that sort of thing, the sort of acrobatics check to swing from a Chandelier and kick someone in the face is basically trivial. An experienced player proposes to do that sort of thing because they know in the game fiction they have the capacity to do it. But a new player to the game doesn't know what the conventions of the fiction actually are, so they tend purpose a lot of things without being aware that their character isn't that "cool" quite yet. Mercer purposes that for those novice player, you put your thumb on the scale and make the chance of a success a little bit higher than what you would for a more experienced player because you don't want their first experience of the game to be failure and ineptitude. Give them a chance to be cool early on, even if technically it's more than their character could do.</p><p></p><p>And I think that's a very functional application of the rule of cool. There are problems with that, but having DMed my niece for the first time a few years back I can totally relate to the situation Mercer is talking about and I can totally remember feeling the need to do that for her until she found her feet.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8750553, member: 4937"] I listened to a Matt Mercer pod-cast on the rule of cool, and I thought Matt's answer was characteristically thoughtful. He described Rule of Cool as something that he situationally applied to new players that didn't know the rules and who therefore didn't know what a character ought to have in order to perform some task reliably. So for a reasonably high-level character that wants to do that sort of thing, the sort of acrobatics check to swing from a Chandelier and kick someone in the face is basically trivial. An experienced player proposes to do that sort of thing because they know in the game fiction they have the capacity to do it. But a new player to the game doesn't know what the conventions of the fiction actually are, so they tend purpose a lot of things without being aware that their character isn't that "cool" quite yet. Mercer purposes that for those novice player, you put your thumb on the scale and make the chance of a success a little bit higher than what you would for a more experienced player because you don't want their first experience of the game to be failure and ineptitude. Give them a chance to be cool early on, even if technically it's more than their character could do. And I think that's a very functional application of the rule of cool. There are problems with that, but having DMed my niece for the first time a few years back I can totally relate to the situation Mercer is talking about and I can totally remember feeling the need to do that for her until she found her feet. [/QUOTE]
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