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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6400851" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, a few more thoughts.Wick introduces his essay by drawing on two narratives from other media to emphasis his point.He never considers the irony of this.The problem with using a movie as an example of role-playing technique is that well, a movie is not a role-playing game.The two scenes in question are basic Bad Ass Establishing Character Moments.  Tons of movies have them.  We could probably list hundreds.  They are a very lazy form of short hand, and the two he's chosen are just about as lazy as examples of writing as I've ever seen.   The basic idea of the scene in it's most stereotypical form is the character is subjected to disrespect from a mook, which allows the character to display to the mook just how far beneath them they actually are.    Some 2nd level thug decides to pick a fight with a protagonist or main villain, and as a result gets their clock cleaned.  Often the hero will voluntarily choose some handicap - arm tied behind back, blindfolded, refuses to actually punch back, just fights with a tea cup, etc. - and yet the bully ends up destroyed anyway.  In many movies, you see parallel Bad Ass Establishing Character Moments setting up a great clash between two characters down the line.D&D or any other system that tries to simulate a reality in general handles this fight just fine.  If a 9th level character (or a 20th level character) fights a 1st level character, it doesn't really matter what weapon the 9th level character is wielding.   The high level character just destroys the low level character without really expending much resources.   So a set up scene of this sort plays out the same provided you set up the scenario in the rules according to the assumptions of the scene.  The bigger question is "Why?"  Why did Riddick use a tea cup?  The answer is more on the meta-level than anything else.   Riddick uses a tea cup to show the audience that Riddick can kill people with a tea cup.   And here we see where the example starts falling apart.  Riddick has no free will.   He's an animaton of the author.   Additionally, Riddick can't actually lose.  The outcome is preordained because the story teller has decided what the outcome is supposed to be.   Riddick is supposed to win easily.   Riddick in fact is risking nothing by using a tea cup.  This is because Riddick, for the purposes of the story, is good at everything.   He doesn't really need to share the story, and since the audience only passively watches the story they share in the story to the same degree that they can share in the story - as passive witnesses of the story teller's magic.  Anyone who is envious of this situation should get out of game mastering and engage in the story teller's craft in an established medium.   In a game, a high level character generally would only use a tea cup if no more powerful option presented itself - a situation which could be arranged in a scenario, but which doesn't regularly occur without lots of game master force.  This is because the character in a role playing doesn't know how the scene is going to finish and is risking something.   In this sense, the narratives of a role playing game - even if they are occurring in a high fantasy world - are more grounded in reality than the narratives of an action adventure movie.   It's not that D&D characters can't use tea cups to kill someone.  It's just that, as in the real world, when you are in a situation of mortal danger where there is real risk, you prefer to use a less improvisational weapon.And note, when you take a protagonist out of these bad ass character establishing scenes and pit them against a real villain, you don't have them fight with just tea cups and one thumb.  Because the whole point of this sort of establishing scene is to establish that if Riddick needs to use a real weapon to face his opponent, then his opponent must also be equally epic and awe inspiring.   Of course, in cinema, using lazy writing like this, you'll often fail to pull that off successfully.   Both the thumb and the tea cup strike me as really lame attempts to achieve a moment of awesome without the requisite character building.Incidentally, any game system with any sort of martial arts could pull of secret techniques like fighting with just one thumb. RPG's don't need this sort of crap.  Anyone that plays an RPG for any length of time gets a very well honed notion of just what exactly is awesome and what is mundane.  In fact, I dare say that having played RPGs is part of what makes a paint by numbers scene attempting to establish bad ass so incredibly unimpressive to me.  You don't show off how cool a character is by having them beat up a zero.To give you the idea how strongly you can write an actual bad ass establishing scene, two parallel scenes occur in my all time favorite movie and they look nothing at all like what you'd expect.  That movie is Chariots of Fire.   The first is Harold Abraham race against the clock, and then later Eric Liddel's run where he picks himself up answers it fully.    Those sort of scenes that can occur in RPGs, but they don't occur just because you want them to happen.   You just play, and they do.  Sometimes you achieve greatness.  Sometimes you fail and have to try again.  I'm not sure there is a sentence in the essay I don't want to refute.  But, at a summary level, it's a big problem that Wick thinks you can just copy technique from a non-interactive medium.   But it's probably even more damning to his argument that he picks really weak stories to highlight as the sort you'd want to emulate.   Earlier, I questioned whether Wick understood what a role-playing game actually was.  Now, thinking about it, I wonder if I should have questioned whether Wick knew what a story was, and if not, whether he was really qualified to be throwing out things on the grounds that he believed they didn't support story.Or to put a finer point on it, if in a system a tea cup does 1d12 damage - just like every other weapon - what story point is actually being made and reinforced by using a tea cup as a weapon?  The whole point of the scene is that the audience knows from experience with the system (in this case something akin to 'the real world) that a tea cup is a substandard weapon.  If the audience knows no weapon is substandard, the audience probably finds the thing even more ridiculous and pretentious than it is.  At least in a system with a weapon table, which the real world definitively has with a degree of fine resolution far exceeding any game system, you'd have an excuse for, "All I have is a tea cup, so that's what I'm using."   In a game without weapon tables, does the lack really make for better stories?   A game without a weapon table makes a tea cup the equal of a bazooka - all the time and not just in those establishing scenes.</blockquote>

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