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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8275750" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm not sure I would consider it any sort of 'solution' really, it just means it happens less. And yes, I think it helps to have the notion of a complication, whether you call it success or failure is almost semantics in many cases. I think, 35 years ago (it was closer to 40) people were already nibbling around the edges of these problems, but they still hadn't really hit on the idea of structuring games in such a way that the mechanics had some abstraction from the fiction, like a 4e SC does. It just wasn't a notion that really existed quite yet. There were people using partial failure, and degrees of success (Marvel Super Heroes basically has that). In fact MSH really was a very innovative game in several ways, but it STILL didn't put things together entirely. Karma let players stack the odds in their favor on checks when they wished, though it was not clearly intended as a meta-game resource, but does function as such. That was 1984, and is a pretty early example of that sort of thing. Coupled with the 'shift table' there were a lot of possibilities there.So, yes, progress was made in the first 10 years. In fact Traveler, by cataloging many of the games standard activities into subsystems which each required a series of checks, could be thought of as ALMOST inventing something like the Skill Challenge, and that was 1977. But all these games pretty much lacked any way to decouple things, and each check was always directly connected to one specific narrative fictional element.</blockquote>

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