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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9611297" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that, if following the rules of the game is not best, the game needs better rules!Back when I was GMing RM, it was relatively hard to get RPGs with complete rules. Now it's easy, because RPG design has progressed a lot in the intervening decades.When I'm GMing Torchbearer 2e, I follow the rules. These include instruction on when to make dice rolls, or when to call for dice rolls. And what to do in response to them. I inject my GM decision-making when the rules tell me to - most often this is when the players fail a dice roll (which happens quite often in TB2e, because of the relationship between typical dice pool sizes and typical difficulties - in this respect TB2e resembles its "parent' game Burning Wheel). There are other occasions too.Here's a contrasting rule, in a different RPG: in Prince Valiant, the rate at which PCs recover from injuries is largely a matter of GM fiat. The rules spell this out explicitly. To me, this makes much more sense than (i) specifying recovery time on a per-day basis (as, say, AD&D does, either literally in the form of hp per day, or indirectly in the form of spells per day which then feeds into cure wound dice of recovery per day), and then (ii) making the passage of time, and the occurrence of interrupting events, something the GM is just entitled to decide. The latter approach also ultimately becomes GM fiat, but the fiat is obscured by, and laden with, all this stuff about recovery times and so on which create the superficial appearance of resources and trade-offs and the like.</blockquote>

Verification