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The other option is that the goblin and the giant have equal chances to hit, but the giant does 10 damage per hit and the goblin does 3. Now theoretically 3 goblins equals a giant, but DR3 simply means goblins are SOL vs plate armor. I don't see a problem with that. Lugging plate armor all over...

4e's approach was interesting. There's a rule for the effect of surprise, but no rules at all describe how it is achieved! Thus surprise is essentially a part of the fiction. Various sources have utilized Stealth, Bluff, and Intuition check results to act as a surprise check in different...

Well, I defer to your direct experience, though I would also assume Wesley has literally run the same scenario or very similar ones literally 1000's of times at this point. Presumably every single thing that can come up in 99% of games has already been accounted for. Sort of like if I ran B2...

You have to be careful here, there are deep differences between Inspectres, a shared storytelling game, and Apocalypse World! In AW all World authoring is the responsibility of the GM. The GM has pretty strict rules and guidelines about how and when and what to author, including deferring to the...

I don't think I am refusing to suspend disbelief just because the setting is being first imagined while we play a zero myth game like Apocalypse World. If the GM asks me "what does Rocker's car look like?" and I answer, then both of us believe that description! It's accepted and becomes...

Right, so to kind of give some historical perspective: you can look at the evolution of RPG design and practice as a process of both making the GM's role easier, or at least more practical. Coupled with this is a broadening of the kinds of situations which these games can handle. Early...

What the fudge does this even mean? IN THE FICTION there either is or is not a cook in the kitchen. The GM says "there is a cook in the kitchen" for <insert real world reason here> and it is so! It strikes me that many posters here, who have all been arguing about this cook for, IIRC at least...

It's not just granularity. I mean, that could factor in, but what seems more important to me is the focus on what the character is doing, as a motivating force in play. I'm not just trying to open a lock, I'm trying to recover the perloined letter which exonerates me from treason so I can go...

IME RPGs have plenty of structure around who gets to decide what, and how. This is a sort of slippery slope here.

So, then how do you propose to explain how babies learn to communicate? Clearly your description is not fully adequate?

Yeah, the real problem here is the richness of the world being described being vastly, almost unimaginably, less than reality. In principle the direct action focused approach seems reasonable. The game simply resolves the 'thin' action description and everything else ramifies out from there in a...

Actually, a little elaboration is useful here. The problem of what is enough progress or evolution of situation is not unique to failure! Success is fraught with the same issue, and it is often a problem in action-resolving systems like most of 5e. The GM is left with a big question, how much...

That's fair enough. I think, personally this is a good reason to want a substantively goal/intent adjudication mechanism. It's pretty easy to say "did you get what you wanted?" Or conversely the GM saying something that doesn't give you what you want. As long as a novel situation arises, you're...

Right, but obviously if that is the standard, then the bar is set below ground level! Every check ever will count as forward progress. IMHO there's got to be a new situation. A repeat of the same old action should not be fictionally coherent. In AW parlance the GM made a move after your 9- and...

Fair enough, but I think I am suggesting that there's little, if any, difference between us in how much we are in character. But this is one of those things that, while there may be an objective element to it, is simply going to remain in the realm of anecdote and fuzzy definitions forever I'm sure.

I'll go a bit further with it. One of the primary purposes of ability scores, alignment, BIFTs, and then on into the more robustly supported sorts of frameworks of modern RPGs is to provide both documentary testimony about the character and its ethos, but also to help the players consistently...

I think we need a middle ground here. As an engineer I need to understand the requirements for a thing, and the wider context of its use. However what I really really need to do, is make it actually work! Translated to RPGs, what I see is a world full of games that are appallingly bad at...

Yeah, this is a very good point. Nobody is entirely in character. You are rolling dice, and listening to narration, and going around the table managing focus and there IS going to be thinking about mechanics and such as well. Now maybe @Maxperson and his group have perfected never dropping even...

I think the problem is, who can say what would have happened in a situation, a REAL WORLD situation, that didn't happen. Lets imagine that @pemerton rolled success. What would the GM in that game have said? He would have had a WIDE variety of options. All they would have had in common would be...

Oh, good grief, can we have an end to this whole "so and so said objectively" nonsense? As a rhetorical technique I now declare it dead and zombified. When I say a game needed to be 'firebombed' in the context of talking about the design of a new game, what do you think that means? 3.5 was, as a...