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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9147251" data-attributes="member: 7040941">It depends on the game; its a sliding scale where from game to game you'll have different amounts of it coming into play. Something like Fellowship deliberately has it, where Monster of the Week tends to only get that way if the group already plays these games like that. Plus, depending on how the game is played, you can very easily get into a state of fatigue trying to come up with consequences, and these games typically are a lot more forward (either deliberately or as part of the overall culture of the family) about opening that up to the table. While it can be done very wrong, that is actually a plus of other kinds of games that have a more system forward design. When done right, the system can alleviate a great deal of the load on both players and GMs. For instance, DCC's magic design, while it requires some prep, is a good example of that in play. Huge possibilities all designed to be relatively easy to reference and run in play. While not strictly freeform, they are very synchronous and thus don't really get in the way of the fiction. As much as it may suck when your eyes fall out of their sockets when you're climbing a mountain, it doesn't feel like its just the system fighting you. It just tends to be the case that a lot of games don't do this right, and PBTA, as noted, seeks to solve that systemic problem by minimizing the system rather than addressing whats making the system break down. A good example of a solution that would go in the other way from how PBTA does it, is to drop to-hit mechanics in favor of directly rolling damage against either a fixed defense value or an also rolled Defense. Its much faster, feels better, and allows for all the exact same possibilities. This one of the earliest things I did for my game's combat system and I've even adapted it to run in DCC, just because it feels that much better.</blockquote>

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