Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6991637" data-attributes="member: 42582">These are exaclty the cases being contrasted:* The rules say I can inflict a penalty on your character, and (incidentally, in the course of doing so) I narrate the fictional cause. A lot of 4e critics see a lot of this in 4e. (I think some of them are wrong, because they're ignoring the keywords, but that's a separate discusssion). In this sort of system, the principal arrow is cube-to-cube ("I made my roll - now you've got to suck up a -2 penalty"). We dont need to invoke any clouds to keep playing. Establishing the fictional explanation for the penalty is incidental, and nothing else follows from it. It hangs there as mere colour.* The rules say that, if conditions in the fiction are thus-and-so, then a penalty is suffered. In this sort of case, there is no alternative but to consult the fiction and generate a rightward arrow from it.At the table, the two cases actually unfold differently: in the first, the penalty is established by rolling the dice; in the second, the penalty is established by considering the fiction. These are different things.No one is afraid of players imagining things.But - similarly to my response to  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] upthread - there is a difference between (i) imagining things, and (ii) having those imagings matter to resolution. The former can happen even when playing a non-RPG (I gave some examples upthread). The latter can't.If the whole game would play out the same whatever the players' imaginings, that does suggest to me that what they're imagining is purely epiphomenal.This is why stuff like "the ogre hurls its half-eaten cow body at you" doesn't strike me as the acme of RPGing. Because, at that point, we only have colour. Nothing in the clouds has actually mattered to any resolution. And no mechanical resolution has generated anything new in the clouds. It's all just GM patter.Now, if something had actually happened, in the course of play, that had brought it about that the ogre has a cow that it might throw at the PCs - that is, if the cow-cloud was an outcome of some event of resolution at the table - that would be a different matter altogether. That would be analogous to the weather determination happening then, which results in me suffering a penalty for oppressive heat now. But that was not how the example was presented.(Why include the above paragraph? The Alexandrian's remark about "skirmish game linked by freeform improv" can be just as apt for a GM-driven colour-rich game as for a skirmish-y game with little or no colour. Or, to put it less contentiously, injecting a lot of GM colour won't make the game "more" of an RPG, if all that colour just froths on the surface but doesn't actually matter to the unfolding play of the game.)Yet RPGs have heaps of this sort of stuff. Hit points are deducted from running tallies, but there is no particular change in the fiction that correlates to this; there is all the stop-motion and turn-by-turn action of cyclic initiative; I would say that spell memorisation in classic D&D comes pretty close to being an instance of this too - yes, it generates an incidental leftward arrow ("You impressed the spell upon your brain"; "Now the spell is wiped from your brain"), but that fiction is bascially epiphomenal (you can't make an AD&D MU forget a spell by clocking him/her hard on the head, for instance).Cube-to-cube is not per se inimical to RPGing, in my view, provided that it is experienced as incidental to something that actually generates meaningful fiction. Now, "experienced as incidental" is going to vary from player to player, from session to session, from table to table. It would make perfect sense for the exact same series of exchanges, interactions etc to be experienced by you as "That was a pretty skirmish-y sesision today" and by me, or even by you in a different mood, as "That was awesome - I really felt like I was there!"This is one reason why I think lecturing people over the internet about whether or not they are really RPGing - something which is oddly popular on these boards! - almost always misfires. If you weren't there and part of it, it's pretty hard to know what was going on, and how all that cube-y stuff related to cloud-y stuff that anyone cares about.Perhaps I've missed something, but isn't this about the game rules, plus how particular actions are framed?Eg, consider the following episode of play (sblocked for convenience):[sblock][/sblock]We know that the successful die roll (a cube-event) results in the Abyss being sealed (a cloud-event) because that is the action the player declared for his PC. The cloud is an input into this resolution (eg it establishes the Hard DC; it establishes that the character can manipulate chaos/entropy and create a zone of impenetrable darkness; it establishes that, by giving of his chaotic essence, the character can increase the degree of entropy). The cubes including - setting the DC from the DCs-by-level table; noting that each surge is a +2 (this guideline is found in the 4e DMG 2); expending the Stretch Spell ability; and of course the rolling of the die. The cloud that results from the success also feeds back into the cubes - the character loses a certain ability, because it never ends and so can never be recharged. (In combat, throwing a non-returning weapon involves a similar fiction-driven depletion of an ability.)I don't see that this sort of case is any different from the attacking case, except that 0 for legacy reasons - typical RPGs tend to have more canonical rules for combat and more handwavey rules/guidelines for other sorts of stuff.</blockquote>

Verification