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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8169998" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, this is what I see as a big problem with more classic RPG processes similar to D&D's where each discrete element of any 'activity' invokes a separate check, with each one being binary pass/fail, gauged purely on some judged measure of difficulty for its DC, and not related in any way to a risk/reward kind of calculation. You see this very evidently when you try to do really serious action adventure with, say, 5e at most tables. Something like "I leap off the balcony, grab the rope, swing across the room, drop, and come down on the bad guy, slamming him with my legs, and then attacking with my sword!" Guess how many checks that is going to provoke in a D&D game? A smart, and nice, GM might be your ally in this sort of action and only make you take an acrobatics check, and a couple of to-hits, and then of course you have to roll damage. A dud roll on any of these will pretty much result in things not going off in an impressive manner. You'd be, mechanically, better off in 99% of cases to just get out your missile weapon and take a shot. Worst case you have to make several very difficult checks. Either way, the cumulative chances of success are low. This may be 'realistic', but is it fun? Sure, once in a while players will just toss common sense to the winds and try anyway, but at its core D&D's process rewards careful, conservative, systematic play, not risk taking. This is baked into its DNA! Other similarly structured games overall do the same thing to varying degrees. A more macroscopic aspect of this sort of thing exists too. Imagine you built a game along the basic mechanical lines of D&D, and your goal was to be the first guy to land on the Moon. Forget it. Its literally a 1 in billions against you opportunity. 'Realistically' you'd have to play through a scenario where you already get to start with most of the qualifications, and then rely on luck and skill at play which will produce that result with fantastically low probability. It is simply put, impossible. This is the problem with the whole concept of play where each thing 'logically and plausibly follows from the rest' where dice, or picking the right options at various points, scale in difficulty in a plausible way. Sure, you are 'free to try', but this is a meaningless freedom. I mean, it is one thing to say "its hard in E. Gary Gygax's D&D campaign for your PC magic user to survive and make it to name level." However, if you play for a while, and hone your skills, you have a pretty decent chance to achieve that. Probably most people who played in 'Greyhawk' for a while 'made it'. Sure, the difficulty made it an interesting challenge, and I'm all for that, but it didn't involve 1 in a million odds. Not because that would be unrealistic (What is the % of name-level wizards in Oerik, it surely isn't very high), but because it wouldn't be that much fun.These are the considerations which led me to cinematic play and resolution systems which match risk to reward and don't pile on layer after layer of accumulated luck as a task becomes more dangerous or implausible. And I get that when in Dungeon World swinging from the balcony, knocking down the bad guy and hacking on him succeeds (at least partly) on a 7+, that in a 'this is a challenging game move' sense it isn't some big deal, but it is STILL COOL, you thought of it, the results are spectacular, the consequences of failure are undoubtedly nasty (even on a 7-9 you can pretty well guarantee you're in some hot water) and even in the best case the bad guy may just stand up again and look REALLY PISSED before he proceeds to try to thrash you! Yes, if you manage to pull off the 20% chance of passing all the various checks in the D&D version you will have done something literally very risky and pulled it off. The coolness is IME not really different though, and in the long run you will have to endure a lot of "you fall on your ass and look stupid" if you play like that every day.</blockquote>

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