NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yesway Jose" data-source="post: 5620501" data-attributes="member: 6679265">That was directly addressed by the very next paragraph which you may have glossed over:We'll not experiencing one single permanent instance of Lord of the Rings. We're experiencing many different iterations of many different stories, after which the limitation on the probability curve of possible outcomes starts to become more apparent. I looked up the Horn of Gondor. Boromir uses once as a sort of warcry and once to call for help. It's not clear if it has any actual enchantment, or just a subtle one. Anyway, Boromir could use it anytime it makes fictional sense, and he could theoretically do that when he wants and how often he wants. 4E wouldn't prevent Boromir from using the horn whenever he wants, but it may limit the number of times it has a consequential effect. Pre-4e, it may have an effect based on fictional prerequisites (ie., whenever someone is in hearing range). So perhaps here's an illustration of disassociation. Player: "I can use the Horn of Gondor 1 x day. Our party is in trouble, we're just at the edge of Gondor's border, so I could blow the horn now and try to summon aid. However, I'll use up the daily. I won't be able to use it later today." Fictionally, however, a character in danger would very rarely hold back from using the horn and almost certaintly never for fear of 'wasting' a once per day opportunity. The only way around this is to force the story to conform to the 1x day mechanic, such that the player never has a fictional incentive to use the horn more 1 x day, but unlike Tolkein writing Lord of the Rings, there's no guarantee of that because the story is an interactive and unpredictable one. Another quibble is that what if the horn is sounded deep inside a cave in the wilderness vs within arrow range of a Gondor castle. There is NOT an equal probability of help arriving any time soon or at all. A "disassociated" mechanic is a Rule that puts its fingers in its ears and shouts "La, la, la!" loudly while you're trying to explain that to the Rule. Due to the above, I think that a game like 4E (sorry to be partisan about it) would entirely remove anything like a Horn of Gondor from the game, because it can't be fairly modelled with 4E design intent. So what actually happens there is that you've realized a potentially interesting fictional construct but then barricaded it from the game, not because it's not a good idea, but because the system won't handle it as such. As usual, it's all relative. All RPGs are disassociated by nature. However, if a game system embraces mechanics-first philosophy to a certain extent....</blockquote>

Verification