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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5877717" data-attributes="member: 42582">By framing it this way I think you make the design challenge clear - if the players know that they have the mechanical resources (be they hp, fate points, whatever) to permit their PCs to sruvive crossing the glass, then why are they going to say "Oh s@*&"? I can think of two possible answers.(1) The players add colour to their roleplay that the mechanics don't support, and that is to some extent at odds with the mechanics. I personally have zero interest in that sort of RPGing - I want the mechanics to matter, otherwise why have them? - but I think some people expect and want players to play like this.(2) The mechanics give the players a reason to say "Oh s@*&". Now, given that we know the PCs are going to survive the glass, the reason can't be that crossing the glass will hurt the PCs. So it has to be some other reason - for example, every time the players play a fate point, the GM gets to amp up some other threat further ahead in the game. Or even Dread's Jenga-style approach - you can cross the glass, but you have to pull, and if the tower crashes then something bad happens to your PC. Or maybe crossing the glass uses up a valuable encounter power (I'm thinking of something analogous to the 10th level utility Fighter's Grit), making you worried about how you might handle what is coming down the line.[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s story above is a good one for this: the ranger PC jumps over the cliff to fight the demons, but lands with only 25 hit points. That's taking a risk, that might make you go "Oh s@*&", even though you know your PC will survive the fall.Anyway, these are the sorts of mechanics that I prefer - mechanics that get the players saying "Oh s@*&" because they set clear and meaningful stakes that the players actually care about (rather than requiring the players to pretend to care about something that the mechanics in fact make irrelevant).Why? I don't know of any other game that handles multiple play styles well. Try playing space opera with Traveller. Try playing heroic fantasy with Runequest (or Basic D&D, for that matter!).I mean, any system has a bit of wriggle room, and with some clever/subtle houseruling plus a bit of squinting mixed in with a bit of social contract can do different things. I discovered, for example, that it is not that hard to push Rolemaster to support a less gritty and more character-focused vanilla narrativist playstyle, if everyone at the table is prepared to let some subsystems go, and to treat other aspects of the system in a certain light.But I think it is pretty optimistic to expect one system to do (for example) both Runequest and Epic tier 4e. (HeroWars/Quest can probably get some of the colour of both, but won't deliver either the grit of Runequest or the gonzo of 4e.)Yes. The repeated notion that, in playing in a style where the mechanics matter, I'm missing out on some nirvanic play experience, becomes a bit annoying.Some of my initial actual play posts were to try to respond to some misconceptions about what my sort of game must be like (eg, to paraphrase an annoying blogger, "tactical skirmish battles linked by free narration").</blockquote>

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