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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7382322" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I largely agree with this. Where I don't agree is if the rules act to create something visually interesting and exciting to imagine. My ideal combat system acts like I've said I want all my rules to act, "one implying and acting to affirm the other." The idea of having combat rules at all is that they are a generative system for creating a combat narrative, where the relationship between a particular rule and something that is happening in the fiction is clear and vica versa. The idea here is that regardless of whether my player is prioritizing narrative or prioritizing the game as tactical wargame, both end up creating a shared experience the other can appreciate. As much as possible, I want to encourage the players to call out propositions that can be represented in the mind's eye by everyone at the table, even if they call them out only at a metagame level of the rules that they are using.</p><p></p><p>There are a lot of systems out there that encourage the player to describe their combat action in a narrative manner, and then resolve it with rules. The problem typically is that the act of narrating your attack adds nothing to the game, the game itself doesn't help you imagine what your attack looks like, and in the long run the act of narration becomes perfunctory or even is dropped and neglected. In my opinion that's the systems fault, and not the players fault. Some systems try to resolve this with a stunt bonus on the attack, but that bonus is usually just GM's whim and the rules that resolve the stunt ultimately don't really alter regardless of what the stunt is.</p><p></p><p>What I want to create is a system where if the play makes a rules proposition it turns into narrative, and where if they make a narrative proposition it turns into rules. While there is no way to have speed of play and also have a generative system that creates the fight choreography of an action movie, I think there is a compromise area where you have enough speed of play and enough generative choreography. I'm not there yet, but I learned more about to do that from 3.X than any other system I've ever played.</p><p></p><p>One of the reasons I read Luke Crane is that I can tell he has the same goal of his combat engines. Like me though, I think he's not there yet. One of the most difficult problems to solve is how to actually encourage variation rather than simply using the same optimal action round after round. Actually, I think 4e was trying to solve the same problem, albeit I think they ended up with a system that was too rigid to encourage the sort of free form play that I think an RPG thrives on. 5e on the other hand seems to have solved the finicky problem and speed of play problems to some extent, but lost sight of the goal of marrying narrative to game, fiction to metafiction, imagination to resolution.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7382322, member: 4937"] I largely agree with this. Where I don't agree is if the rules act to create something visually interesting and exciting to imagine. My ideal combat system acts like I've said I want all my rules to act, "one implying and acting to affirm the other." The idea of having combat rules at all is that they are a generative system for creating a combat narrative, where the relationship between a particular rule and something that is happening in the fiction is clear and vica versa. The idea here is that regardless of whether my player is prioritizing narrative or prioritizing the game as tactical wargame, both end up creating a shared experience the other can appreciate. As much as possible, I want to encourage the players to call out propositions that can be represented in the mind's eye by everyone at the table, even if they call them out only at a metagame level of the rules that they are using. There are a lot of systems out there that encourage the player to describe their combat action in a narrative manner, and then resolve it with rules. The problem typically is that the act of narrating your attack adds nothing to the game, the game itself doesn't help you imagine what your attack looks like, and in the long run the act of narration becomes perfunctory or even is dropped and neglected. In my opinion that's the systems fault, and not the players fault. Some systems try to resolve this with a stunt bonus on the attack, but that bonus is usually just GM's whim and the rules that resolve the stunt ultimately don't really alter regardless of what the stunt is. What I want to create is a system where if the play makes a rules proposition it turns into narrative, and where if they make a narrative proposition it turns into rules. While there is no way to have speed of play and also have a generative system that creates the fight choreography of an action movie, I think there is a compromise area where you have enough speed of play and enough generative choreography. I'm not there yet, but I learned more about to do that from 3.X than any other system I've ever played. One of the reasons I read Luke Crane is that I can tell he has the same goal of his combat engines. Like me though, I think he's not there yet. One of the most difficult problems to solve is how to actually encourage variation rather than simply using the same optimal action round after round. Actually, I think 4e was trying to solve the same problem, albeit I think they ended up with a system that was too rigid to encourage the sort of free form play that I think an RPG thrives on. 5e on the other hand seems to have solved the finicky problem and speed of play problems to some extent, but lost sight of the goal of marrying narrative to game, fiction to metafiction, imagination to resolution. [/QUOTE]
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