The Shaman
First Post
Ground Rule: If you want to talk about helmets of potion drinking, go do it in the other thread - here, it's threadcrapping and will be referred to the moderators as such.
The poll results are in, and they are pretty interesting.
First, I found that fact that over half of the respondents rated their dungeon masters five-of-five on the 'Awesome!' and well over ninety percent rated their dungeon masters as three-of-five or higher encouraging. Less than three percent were rated one-of-five.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the respondents also agreed heavily with the statements, "The DM is better at handling some situations than the rules" - five-of-five over fifty percent, two-of-five or less at five percent - and, "The game should make room for the DM to make real decisions" - five-for-five nearly fifty percent, and two-of-five or less under seven percent.
The statement, "The rules are better at handling some situations than the DM," received less support - five-of-five just thrty-two percent, or around a third, and two-of-five or less over seventeen percent, or not quite one-fifth.
I think one of the aspects that makes tabletop roleplaying games a unique form of entertainment is the referee's role. Having a living, breathing human being to adjudicate and arbitrate the action bings unmatched flexibility and creativity to game-play. Note that this extends to games with shared or distributed referee authority as well - the advantage comes from the wetware interface, not necessarily the number of terminals, as it were.
I prefer games which provide the tools to quick, consistent adjudication and arbitration by the refeee rather than games which substitute extensive rules for the referee's judgement. I've read the argument that consistency is best achieved by those extensive rules, but in my expeience they come at a loss of flexibility and speed. For me, a game which provides a principle or a rule-of-thumb for how skills work is preferable to a game with exhaustive delineation of how each skill works.
Frex, skill checks in Flashing Blades are made by rolling under an attribute score, such as Wit or Charm or Luck. To make a task more difficult, I can assign a modifier, or I can simply divide the attibute score by two or three, to reflect a more significant challenge. This provides me with a fast, flexible, consistent rule-of-thumb for making rulings in play across the full spectrum of non-martial skills without attempting to address every possible corner case for each. This is a useful tool.
In any case, I found the poll results interesting.
The poll results are in, and they are pretty interesting.
First, I found that fact that over half of the respondents rated their dungeon masters five-of-five on the 'Awesome!' and well over ninety percent rated their dungeon masters as three-of-five or higher encouraging. Less than three percent were rated one-of-five.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the respondents also agreed heavily with the statements, "The DM is better at handling some situations than the rules" - five-of-five over fifty percent, two-of-five or less at five percent - and, "The game should make room for the DM to make real decisions" - five-for-five nearly fifty percent, and two-of-five or less under seven percent.
The statement, "The rules are better at handling some situations than the DM," received less support - five-of-five just thrty-two percent, or around a third, and two-of-five or less over seventeen percent, or not quite one-fifth.
I think one of the aspects that makes tabletop roleplaying games a unique form of entertainment is the referee's role. Having a living, breathing human being to adjudicate and arbitrate the action bings unmatched flexibility and creativity to game-play. Note that this extends to games with shared or distributed referee authority as well - the advantage comes from the wetware interface, not necessarily the number of terminals, as it were.
I prefer games which provide the tools to quick, consistent adjudication and arbitration by the refeee rather than games which substitute extensive rules for the referee's judgement. I've read the argument that consistency is best achieved by those extensive rules, but in my expeience they come at a loss of flexibility and speed. For me, a game which provides a principle or a rule-of-thumb for how skills work is preferable to a game with exhaustive delineation of how each skill works.
Frex, skill checks in Flashing Blades are made by rolling under an attribute score, such as Wit or Charm or Luck. To make a task more difficult, I can assign a modifier, or I can simply divide the attibute score by two or three, to reflect a more significant challenge. This provides me with a fast, flexible, consistent rule-of-thumb for making rulings in play across the full spectrum of non-martial skills without attempting to address every possible corner case for each. This is a useful tool.
In any case, I found the poll results interesting.
