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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7564705" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here's what's interesting, your Traveler "random dicing" method aside, that is EXACTLY what ALL OTHER METHODS ARE. The 'realism proponents' talk about some sort of 'realistic assessment of what is likely', but I call that unrealistic. That is, I don't think anyone is BSing anyone, deliberately, but I don't think that's EVER what happens in real play in any RPG game which continues on successfully at all. I don't think it is even plausible, or possible. We simply cannot know enough about the world in which the game is taking place. It is in fact whole cloth made up of nothing BUT our feelings and gut instincts, mixed with a thin bit of basic causal reasoning and 99% "it is this way because it will make it fun." That is, in all cases, in all games, the Sect is either met in the Inn or not because that is the option which the GM decided was going to be a better game than any other. Heck, I even put paid to the dice here to a large extent. Yeah, GMs 'follow the dice', but they also ignore them, and probably more often in this sort of case than would be admitted by people invested in that as a concept. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] rolled dice to 'find certain kinds of people' in his Traveler game, but did he simply accept every result literally with no interpretation? Of course not. First of all, no chart can give you enough information to run with. You have to fill in a LOT of blanks! This is all done by figuring out what is going to be interesting and 'viable' in play. No GM decides that "Organized Crime" means 50 of your worst enemies show up and pump the party full of lead in an unsurvivable hail of bullets. Maybe its 10 guys, or they show up with derringers "because you can't get anything bigger into town" or whatever 100 other things the GM can say to make it sound logical. Maybe he decides your worst enemies just got a bigger enemy and they let you off the hook if you will take those guys for them. You can make it interesting in a lot of ways, but you will never, ever, in a thousand years, exterminate the party in a hail of lead.Actually I did once run a Traveler campaign where the premise was a doomed space station. Death was 100% inevitable, but even then it was a device in that it was a stated fact that was made apparent to the characters in the first scene and was known by the players when they agreed to play that game. You CAN do anything, and make anything fun, but not often or all the time. The hail of lead might work too as the very last scene of a campaign that is guaranteed to be coming to an irrevocable end for whatever reason. It won't happen in ongoing play. Certainly not often. It isn't realism that rules, it is fun, always. Dig far enough down and its all turtles!</blockquote>

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