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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8958996" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, it's certainly better as a systematic approach than what you had available in 1e.  I notice when I talk rules with long time 1e AD&D GMs (and I did run the system for a long time but gave up on it about 25 years ago now) is that they are very happy to talk about how they would use ruling in their own system, even if they are the one writing the rules.  This is an approach to rules vastly different than my own, which is that the rules represent some sort of contract or communication, where either I'm communicating with the player as a GM with regard to how he can expect situations to be handled, or else I am communicating as from one GM to the other and want to be exactly clear about how I would expect the rules to be used.  Rulings for me represent what you are doing with respect to the inevitable edge cases and areas that the rules are silent on, and not what your general practice is.  The whole point to me of creating a system is to get away from the need to always create rules.  As for your discussion of the granularity of difficulty, and how do you know whether something is 'easy', 'moderately difficult', 'difficult' or 'very difficult' and how ambiguity or arbitrariness with respect to the difficulty overrides in consistency, there is some truth to that but also I think it misses the point.  The point is that assignment of difficulty, even if arbitrary, is consistent across the party.   So if I say that swimming in the pool of water is moderately difficult, and thus DC 10, then what matters less is whether I've measured the current in the pool and accurately calculated the DC compared to other pools, but the fact that every players ability to swim handles the pool consistently.  The lightly armored barbarian with his mighty arms has a really good chance of swimming (2+ on a DC20), while the heavily armored cleric has a good chance of sinking like a stone (anything less than 15+ on a D20).  There is a high percentage chance things work as expected and investment in being able to swim pays off.  The trouble with D6 as a fortune compared to a D20 and the reason that systems that used a single D6 tend to fail except as rules light one shots were success isn't a serious consideration is that there tends to not be enough room for variation in the fortune or for consideration of the situation.  I think D20 has worked out so well as a fortune mechanic because it's not as fiddly as a d% while it's much more granular than D10 or D6, and the math is much simpler and more intuitive than dice pools.But again, basically I'm just saying I prefer something like the 3e skills system (no surprise, I said that at the beginning).  My solution was going to be to integrate an ability check system based off the 3e system with NWP and then turn everything that looked like a skill into a NWP that gave you a situational boost to checks related to that NWP.  So, "Trapfinding" and "Climbing" and "Stealth" etc. were going to become NWP's and thieves were effective going to start with the whole fist full of them.</blockquote>

Verification