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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6683791" data-attributes="member: 4937">I share with you a disdain for blindly applied narrativist mechanics, added to games because of slogans like, "Indy is good!" or "Narrativist is good!" without really understanding the role such a mechanic should have or what sort of story you are trying to create.  In a game like say Dread, the fact that there is building tension that comes from the player's knowledge of impending doom adds to the atmosphere that the game is trying to achieve (I presume, as I haven't actually played the game).  And I understand why adding to the sense of impending doom and ever increasing danger makes sense within the context of a game meant to simulate a horror story that is usually of a single stand alone chapter.I can't imagine what a person reading Conan short stories thought corresponded to the mechanic of Threat or why it was needed to improve the story within the game.  The usual story arc seen in a Conan short story is that of the motif that will assume a greater and hopefully surprising significance at the stories conclusion.  In other words, they aren't marked by increasing Threat and with it inevitable failure, but by a revelation or discovery.   If anything, I would reverse the described mechanic as the usual mode of Conan's action is more like Rocky in a Rocky movie - the more that is demanded of him, the greater reserves of strength he is found to have.  So maybe every time you fail in a Conan story, you gain a point you can apply to some category like: "blinding speed of the panther" or "natural killer" or "mirthless savage grin".  Then at some future point you can narrate how your "blinding speed of the panther" helps you in this situation, and spend the point to gain some advantage.  That might make at least a little bit of sense.Leaving aside it's poor suitability to the source material, the Threat mechanic seems to be a mechanic designed with the intent of creating a good GM where the mechanic only works if you have a good GM in the first place.   Then the imaginary DM is displaying their inexperience and the situation is the fault of the imaginary DM.   Of course my assessment is based on the narrative I've been given.  Whether the narrative is imaginary or relates something that actually happened doesn't change my assessment of the narrative.And again, the solution here is not for the imaginary DM to say, "No!" to the player or constrain their agency.  The solution is for the DM to in the future work hard to see that the player is not tempted to make life and death decisions based on knowledge that the character wouldn't have.Even so, this is exactly the same assessment I made when judging the tactical value of feinting in the situation.  In D20, a 'non-improved' feint is generally only a valid tactic when doing so would more than double your chance of hitting.   So, for example, if the target's AC was 18 and it had no other source of XP but a +8 dodge bonus, and you had no bonus to hit, feinting the target to drop it's AC to 10 would be reasonable.   You have only a 15% chance to hit without a feint.   If you attack twice, you expect ~27.8% chance of hitting at least once.   But if you feint, you expect about a 55% chance of hitting at least once.   But suppose the target's AC was 13 and you had a +2 bonus to hit.   If you fient and drop the target's AC to 10, you have a 65% chance of hitting at least once.  But if you just attacked twice, you would have had a 75% chance of hitting at least once.   Or another way to put this, is that if the average attack did 6 damage, in the case of feinting then attacking the expected result is 3.9 damage.   But the expected result of attacking twice is 6 damage.   This gets more complicated to calculate with armor as DR, but the results still will favor attacking twice.But the actual utility of feinting under the mechanics of the system isn't actually what determines whether the DM mishandled the process of play.</blockquote>

Verification