Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8144041" data-attributes="member: 5142">I don't think this is an equivalent comparison. Penicillin wasn't an unintended by-product of negative space. Penicillin was the result of scientists actively trying to isolate a historically well-recognized antibacterial agent in strands of fungal mold. I don't think it's necessarily harder. It's just we haven't adopted a system where that's the norm. So thinking out of that norm has a hasty habit of proving challenging to those deeply entrenched in it. This perhaps unfairly maligns social skills when part of the larger issue was the 3e skill system as a whole. Worth noting, is that large parts of the Indie Story scene were likewise responses to what they were seeing in the 3e skill system, namely mechanics first. This is one reason why the whole notion of "fiction first" is an important principle in indie games. So the idea that social mechanics = "no roleplay" or "skip all the talking" shows a lack of awareness of the larger body of conversation in the hobby. For game engines like PbtA, Fate, Cortex, FitD, etc., "fiction first" also means that the roleplaying has to come before the roll. This is largely because the roll happens when there are consequences at stake as a result of the fictional framing by the associated characters. That sounds less like "benefit of the doubt" and more like "confirmation bias" to me, but it's inconsequential. You may be missing the actual thrust of discussion here: i.e., the dependency of fictional resolution and/or new fictional states on convincing/entertaining Bob the GM. Or let's put it another way. It doesn't necessarily matter how well in-character you roleplay or act when social resolution ultimately boils down to convincing Bob. In fact, all the roleplaying and acting, in this case, is nothing more than high quality lipstick on the "Mother-May-I" Pig, because Bob holds all the cards for social scene resolution. But let's not pretend that the system is anything more mechanically meaningful than "In Bob We Trust."</blockquote>

Verification