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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8723586" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is an interpretation you are imposing on me.  It's not something that I've said.  This is an interesting statement, because you say you want the in game to matter more, and the in character to matter more and that's fine.  But if we look at what you actually mean by this in practice it is you want the character sheet to matter more.  You want to facilitate direct access to the rules for adjudicating the game without checking the fiction.  You don't want the in game to ever get in the way of the player pressing the out of game buttons and get access to his out of game numbers.  You're happy with a completely out of character move, "I use diplomacy on it", "Ok, roll the dice."  You are prioritizing the game rules over the game fiction, and the character sheet over the character, and not by a little bit on the spectrum but by a lot - a whole lot.   And all your explanations defending this come down to, "People were afraid that they might lose."  I don't either.  I'm using the term to separate out a portion of the overall table play which includes out of character jokes, rules discussions, and lots of other things that don't advance the story of the game.I didn't say you had, but your stance on play makes your game read like "Order of the Stick".  Rich breaks the 4th wall to be funny and to meta-comment on RPing as a pasttime.  So he has characters in world make statements like, "I think I failed a Spot check", because that's funny.  No there isn't, but I didn't say there was.  This is sounding like you are setting up another strawman to burn down where you take a simple and reasonable suggestion that was nothing like what I was talking about and then act like that was what I was talking about.  An example might be a show like The Orville showing the protagonists pinned down by laser fire, outnumbered and desperate, and a character says, "I don't know how we are going to get out of this one." and then another character says, "Wait, I have a plan", and then we cut from that scene to another one where the characters are back aboard the ship safe and sound saying, "Wow. I thought for sure we were goners there." And another one says, "Man that was some plan you had there."  That's a comedic cut.  That's parody.  And if you use a fast forward/hand wave as deus ex machina to save the bacon of the protagonists because you wrote them into a corner, that works in a comedy.  That's at the level of, "Wait, let's get the DVD of the movie and see how we get out of this."  If you break the 4th wall with that sort of plot averting short cut in a serious film you'd better be able to explain it later on and be doing literary tricks with telling the story out of order to achieve some well planned effect.A good example I can think of in a novel where hand waving through the scene almost ruins the novel is Erin Morgenstern's "The Night Circus"  This is a novel with a lot of good features - strong characters, beautiful evocative writing, a good setup.  But it ultimately for me fails to be a classic because Morgenstern's non-linear timeline mostly serves to avoid having to explain the major plot points of the story.  We keep getting references to hugely important story events that change the trajectory of the characters lives, such as "what happened in Prague".  But at the end of the story, these events are still off stage and we never do learn what they were and so we never do get scenes that explain why the character's personality, motives, and actions changed.  Instead of being shown how and why they change, we end up just being told that they dramatically changed.  That is weak writing.The rule here is similar to the rule in RPGs.  You can handwave through a scene if nothing is at stake.  In an RPG you don't bother rolling if failure is meaningless.  Heck, you might just skip to the chase.   If the audience hears a plan that is likely to work and which is boring to get into the details of - "We need to go down to hardware store and pick up a pallet of 2x4's" - you can cut over that scene to a scene where something is at stake - "Ok, new scene.  You have the 2x4's".  You don't have to show a mundane non-risky detail.  But handwaving through a scene where the audience isn't given a reasonable understanding of how you got from A to B and there seems to be a lot of risk is bad writing whether it's in a novel, movie, or an RPG.</blockquote>

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