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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2402600" data-attributes="member: 27012">FYI, the scope of my anecdotal claim was "often".  If I qualified everything I said with "in my opinion", "in my experience", or "I think", the size of my posts would be even large and I've already received complaints that I'm writing novels.  I suppose I should also mention that I was talking about the mechanical resolution portion of running a game and what I said doesn't necessarily conflict with what Ryan Dancey said.What really slows a game down (in my experience, in my opinion, I think, etc.) is detail.  My group can run fairly fast combats using the Hero System or D&D 3.5 because we often strip out detail.  We don't keep careful track of Endurance in Hero.  There are things I don't bother with in D&D 3.5.  The fewer variables you plug into an equation, the faster the equation is to solve.  To successfully use a rule-light system (and avoid the "Mother May I?" or "Twenty Questions" problems) is to keep the detail and situational modifiers simple and coarse.  No, you can't explicitly feint in combat because your character is assumed to be using feints as part of their attack when appropriate for their skill level.  No, you can't get a "plus" because you're trash talking your opponent or your description of your attack was really vivid.  No, you don't get a "minus" because the ground is muddy or you tossed some coins in the air.  As soon as you start factoring in details, either as part of the rules or described to and factored in with the GM, the game slows down.  What I think Ryan Dancey was claiming is that the process of negotiating the details of a particular task resolution with the GM can be as time consuming as figuring it out with the rules.  And in my own experience, what negates much of the benefit of not looking up the rules is the bottleneck of the GM as the arbiter.Correcting for DM ability and the detail level at which the game is being run.  There is also a style issues that I think play a big role in the assumptions people bring to this debate.For the record, before we started using a modified version of Fudge, my group primarily used homebrew systems designed by the GM (or group) so the GMs were literally both GM and game designer.  Our heavily modified version of Fudge is often a mix of Fudge and our last generation homebrew systems.  So, yes, I can understand how GMs who are not on-the-fly game designers could have trouble doing what my group does.  In fact, if you are good at assessing things on-the-fly and your players like your on-the-fly calls, you don't even need rules or dice, and if you want to use dice for surprise all you really need is a rule like "high rolls are good, low rolls are bad".  My group can and has run one-shot games like that.I don't think that looking at this in terms of "maturity", "intelligence", "trust", or "evolution".  That leads to the same-ol' judgementalism that runs rampant in all discussions of role-playing styles which inevitably turn into some variation of, "My way of role-playing is more mature/intelligent/highly evolved than your immature/simple/primative way of playing."  Once the discussion goes down that road, it becomes impossible to communicate because it becomes personal and more about twisting everything to fit the theory than really finding out what's going on.Let's step back from that.  My group doesn't have a maturity problem, an intelligence problem, a creativity problem, a trust problem, or an evolution problem and we're not afraid to try different things.  Our problems with rule-light systems, when we have them, are caused by the play style of many people in our group and insurmountable differences in our assessments of reality when we GM.  Because of that, a certain amount of complexity seems to improve the quality of our games.  Our challenge is finding the level of complexity that's "just right".Out of curiosity, do your group play world-based games or story-based games?I think that's true of one segment of the hobby.  I also think D&D 3e's complex rules drive a certain segment of gamers away from the hobby.  I think the mistake many people make is that they assume that everyone plays for the same reason and has the same ideals.  That's not true.  Heavy rules serve certain ideals better than light rules do, and vice-versa.  Each also sacrifices certain benefits that some styles value more than others.</blockquote>

Verification