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: 8799544" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is fine.  I like levers for letting players engage with the fiction as well.  Even if you have an abstract system, it is nice to have a framework for handling what is a stunt in that system like the aforementioned grapple and called shot.But as someone who has gone down the path you are going down ("working on a system") several times in the last 40 years, I got to tell you that it doesn't always get to where you want.   The question you need to ask yourself is whether you really need to handle the above stunt concretely or whether you can get "good enough" results abstractly with fewer steps.  Think of the game engine like a black box and you don't know how it works, you only know what answers you get.  If the answers you get could be made by a simpler engine to a reasonable approximation it might be worth it to use the simpler engine instead of taking 5 dice rolls and seven steps to get there.  Otherwise you are going to need to be like Pheonix Command players and write a computer program that handles your combat engine for you to avoid slowing down play.One example of the sort of design decisions you need to make is to make sure your system is consistent with respect to whether it resolves things as Fortune at the Beginning, Fortune in the Middle, or Fortune at the End.  If you start switching around how you handle situations differently so that you are doing FITM for normal attacks but FATE for called shots (for example) you are going to create incoherencies and balance problems.  "Called Shots" tend to move people's thinking toward FATE, that is to say, when making a called shot you are pretty strongly setting the stakes before the fortune roll - "on success, a dagger ends up stuck into this guy's arm pit" - in a way D&D doesn't normally do.  D&D normally tends to do the fortune in the middle and interprets the result from the fortune.     So "Called Shots" introduce to a system that is basically D&D with its FITM process of play the same sort of problem D&D has historically had with things like falling from heights and contact with lava where the stake seems to be set from the situation and not the fortune.  It's the same problem that people have with hit points when they mentally set the stake on success before rolling the dice "The sword ends up running through the target", leading to people asking questions like, "How does a guy survive being run through with a sword five times?"In 3.5e I have house rules that handle something like, "I grab the guy and try to shove a dagger in his arm pit" abstractly.  Without getting into details, it's essentially a well-defined stunt where the player is asking, "If I win this contest, can I get a bonus to hit and damage?  I recognize I could take a penalty if I fail to win the contest".  Thus, we are adding a step to the combat, but not breaking the assumptions of the system without getting into the gritty details of simulation of process where you decide on things like how hard it is to hit an arm pit when someone is trying to resist you and how deep the dagger goes into the body if you do and what wounds result from that.</blockquote>

Verification