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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5501996" data-attributes="member: 813">This turned an interesting direction. In college I ran a game with no numbers. The players each created a character history detailing what they knew about themselves up until the start of play. So some were former soldiers who kept an old sword by the door and one was a fire mage on the run after his master was killed. One of them was the strongest man in the village. Etc. So based on the descriptions I wrote up (for my own reference) a list of stats for the group and used them to loosely run a game of d10 Fantasy Hero without telling them what system I was running.The game fell apart when one of the players complained that he did not know what he could do. And my constant answer to this (Ask me and I'll tell you if you think you can do it) was insufficient. He wanted to know the odds on whether he could just a 10 foot chasm. And my response "With a good running start you're pretty sure you'll make it" grated on him. My question "do you know the real odds of you, not your character, making the same jump?" was not enough to show him the absurdity of knowing the odds. I suppose you could set up a 10 foot span and attempt to jump across it a couple dozen times to get a good number but who does that? And how is that helpful when confronted with a chasm (is it really 10 feet? 9.5? 11?) and you are being chased? Even when I switched to "You think there's a 90% chance you will make it." It didn't help because he didn't want to sit there and have to ask a dozen questions in order to figure out what to do next. Or so he claimed.This is why some gamers need things like skill sets spelled out and some do not. (Why d10? Part of the fiction of there being no numbers was there were no dice. So I used a thick book for my randomizer. As long as his skip pages 1-99 and n00 to nxx where n is the highest 100's digit in the book, the middle digit of the page number opened to should be pretty random and you don't have the odd/even problem of the page numbers.)</blockquote>

Verification