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: 1759195" data-attributes="member: 813">Note to self, Joe is a Narrativist. I am a gamist. Do not play any pick up games at conventions with Joe DMing.You are reading this backwards. Have you ever look across a gap and said to yourself. I can jump that or I can't jump that? In general, looking out your eyes of your body, you know what you can and cannot do within a certain level of certainty.In your example, if the DM tells me there's a 10 foot gap, I can look at my character's Jump ability and see what his chances are. Based on those chances I can determine the correct ROLE-PLAYING decision based on the character's personality. In prior editions, the DM had to make the decision for me: "Does Thrag think he can jump the pit?" DM: "Since YOU usually play him self-assured, he is sure he can make it."Me, I'd rather play in the game where I interpret my character's self-assuredness rather than have the DM determine the chance of success based on his opinion.ASIDE: I once GMed a game using no rules. The players wrote full backgrounds on their characters and I used them to generate percentages in  my head and (in full gamist fashion) I then made sure that over the course of the game the percentages lined up. I had scratch note character sheets in a system that I used to keep track of how good the characters were at various tasks.The players had nothing but my descriptions. After a time, one player had to drop out because, as he said to me, he didn't know what the character could do. Without a number on a sheet (any number), he had no way to make decisions about the character without basically flipping a coin.That is why I don't like narrativist gaming. Whenever I GM now, I prefer a system where the player does not need to ask the GM "Does my character think he can do this?" GMs will answer based on personality. And thus they are playing the character, not the player. The GM should respond. "There is a 60% chance of success. You tell me if the character thinks he can succeed." But no GM is going to respond like that.And none of this has anything to do with rules lite or not.</blockquote>

Verification