NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8928329" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Hold up. If bringing specific narrative effects to bear necessarily involves "recontextualising the scene" what other room is there for resolution? All you've got left is some kind of roll to interact, and that's just gambling, not a mechanic that involves decision making on the part of the player.I'm partial to specific, discrete narrative powers behind spread about more liberally than just the wizard class, and specifically think many of them should be in the skill system and effectively always on for some "mundane" specialists, but I don't want to play a game without them. Resource management and finding efficiencies between your abilities and the situation is the entire non-combat game in classic D&D. If those effects are unbounded ahead of time (i.e. you can alter the narrative however you want, or as the result of some negotiation) then you've already lost half of the potential mechanical hooks to play a game with. Resource management without the potential for efficiencies is at best a push your luck game asking you when to withdraw, and at worst, completely determined and not a game.I suppose you could make the efficiencies entirely reactive. You decide which obstacles to spend on, and have to evaluate their costs for not doing so? That quickly runs into an information problem, because optimal pay becomes about depending your HP or will or taking on conditions or whatever in the the best combination (probably either all in on one, or spread out as evenly as possible). That's still a game, but I don't see why removing half of the possible decision making space would make a game more interesting.</blockquote>

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