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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8272475" data-attributes="member: 18">But what's confusing me here is that you seem to be saying they're putting things into this sort of quantum state where the player doesn't know what's going on, but if I look at the rules suggestions on page 242, that doesn't appear to be the case:Here's a cut-down take on them I found:"SUCCESS AT A COST: ...When a character fails a roll by only 1 or 2, you can allow the character to succeed at the cost of a complication or hindrance. Such complications can run along any of the following lines... A character fails to intimidate a kobold prisoner, but the kobold reveals its secrets anyway while shrieking at the top of its lungs, alerting other nearby monsters.DEGREES OF FAILURE: ...A character who fails to disarm a trapped chest might accidentally spring the trap if the check fails by 5 or more, whereas a lesser failure means that the trap wasn't triggered during the botched disarm attempt... Perhaps a failed Charisma (Persuasion) check means a queen won't help, whereas a failure of 5 or more means she throws you in the dungeon for your impudence.CRITICAL SUCCESS OR FAILURE: ...rolling a 1 on a failed attempt to pick a lock might break the thieves' tools being used, and rolling a 20 on a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check might reveal an extra clue."So I don't see how "success at a cost" makes the game worse. Can you explain that? "If you fail by 1-2 points the DM may give you a choice to succeed with a complication or hindrance". The only issue I see is the "may"? Otherwise this is a similar approach to a lot of games, including BitD, and can absolutely be factored in for.Degrees of failure I'm also not really seeing how that's different either, apart from you knowing the fairly consistently, if you fail by 5 or more, the DM will go for a worse result than less than that. Again this seems like something you can account for.Critical fail/success I loathe but there's no question there - you can absolutely account for that, I've played games in which this is used.You say that unless the DM is consistent they muddy the waters, but I think that's a pretty straightforward matter, and if the DM is inconsistent, you're already playing like this to some extent, just based on his whimsy. The only real potential issue I see is if the DM didn't always apply them to rolls. Like if some of the time they did, and other times they didn't, and I mean apply them at all - like one roll a fail by 1-2 was success-at-a-cost, next time is was straight fail, and so on. That would be unhelpful, but also nearly inconceivable to me.You also mentioned "fail forward" as one of these options and it isn't. I'm not sure why you mentioned it - isn't that just a principle of design? And one that applies to D&D even w/o page 242?Oh definitely. And confusing the issue is that with PtbA at least there's still quite a bit of "ask the DM" or "the DM will tell you what to roll", which can slow down how they re-understand the system, ironically probably helps PtbA's popularity as it's less of a "system shock".It's not an appeal to popularity, my point is one that you agreed above - most games take a D&D-ish approach. Hence a lot of the criticism of D&D specifically even though the the issue is a broad/general one with systems taking that general approach feels a little misguided. I guess maybe it's a point more important to me than others? Like, I see two general issues in this thread:1) Issues largely specific to D&D which make it ill-suited to integrating or emulating genre stuff.2) Issues broadly applicable to all DM-centric RPGs that make them ill-suited to emulating specific genre stuffMaybe I'm the only one who cares lol. But I think it's relevant because a lot of people dismissively saying "D&D doesn't support heists and is bad at them!" would start feeling real uncomfortable if they had to say the same about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk, even though they have nigh-identical issues.Literally the argument you've made about D&D's page 242 being bad appears to apply completely to Hard-Wired Island, except maybe Hard-Wired Island is worse, because if the player fails in HWI, they have no idea if the DM will go with total failure, success at a cost, or a bargain, rather than the numbers determining it. So "right back atcha" with the "how is this a challenging statement"? If you are saying HWI is bad for the same reasons page 242 is bad, okay, but that's an interesting opinion.</blockquote>

Verification