Recent content by Thomas Shey

Well, as some of this discussion has shown, how "meta" a currency or resource is not only varies from game to game, it varies in the eye of the beholder. WoD Willpower and TORG Possibilities behave just like some naked metacurrencies (far as that goes three of the four pools in Eclipse Phase)...

That's why the term "apologist" is not usually used in a positive way.

Let me try to clarify. You have a lockpicker who tries to pick a lock. Is it obvious up-front that its difficult? In many cases probably not (mechanical locks actually try to make that hard to assess as a consequence of making it hard in the first place). So how does the lockpicker determine...

No, I was assuming the lockpick attempt just conveyed how difficult it was; I'm not assuming the "difficulty" changed by what they rolled.

Well, honestly, with trivial and regular skills without intense time pressure, its bound to be.

It makes more sense with some skills than others. I tend to find it follows better with perception-type skills than most others.

Well, at least as far as single approach/skill use, it could well be that the lockpicker after he's tried goes, essentially "This is a stupid complex lock. I might be able to get it over time but I'd be here for hours and we don't have that. Kick the thing down." You could get the social...

Oddly enough, even the Hero System does this, though not quite in that flat a way; most tasks get a bonus for taking more time, and as long as you increase your chance, you can keep trying. The bonuses don't rack up linearly with time, so if you're not very capable or the lock is really hard it...

With a flashback mechanism, that's always going to be an issue with people who are bothered by that sort of thing. Given where that's usually used, I tend to think of it in that context as an allergy to a genre convention, and I can only develop so much sympathy there.

Oh, they're both straightforward. 1. Momentum as a group resource. I've just never seen a group I played with where that wouldn't cause undesirable group stressors. 2. Some of the more rigid ability to use "approaches". I don't actually buy into the general system's idea that you can...

I'm in the weird position that I find Storypath interesting, but have a couple parts of it I just don't entirely buy into. Mind, both can be "repaired" but they aren't tiny parts of the system. Curseborn is very interesting, but part of its basic premise and how that's mechaniced (the way the...

Well, notice my feelings on the second part are less strong than the first. Like I said, it just makes my brain itch in a bad way, but its not a hill I'd die on the way I would for the first. In practice I've seen it damn near treated that way in some interpretations of some game systems.

Arguably from the sound of it, it just reverses the cause-and-effect process, but that sounds like it still has largely the same result.

Sure, but that's not what I suggested. I suggested that a big part of the reason for that is we're dealing with things we simply can't handle deterministically (again, barring just ignoring a whole lot, some of which on some level most people don't want to). I mean you can get into an argument...

And I simply disagree. I think it very much represents those reasons.