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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5733421" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'll admit I wasn't really thinking about the context of a poetry contest. (Why not, given what I was responding to? Dunno - my brain got switched to a different track between reading the posts and typing replies.) I was thinking of the production of poetry in a broader context (eg wooing, or otherwise impressing).But I tend to think along S'mon's lines. (And I'm also influenced a bit by BW's Duel of Wits mechanics.) The real question in the scene seems to be "Who do the judges favour?". And that's something for which there are action resolution mechanics, which I tend to favour engaging. If the contest was being resolved as a skill challenge (the default 4e approach if something is at stake - if nothing is at stake, then free roleplaying will produce the result that a player who produces some tolerable poetry wins) then I'd be happy to treat a beautiful piece of poetry as one success in the challenge. (I've never done this with poetry before, but have done it with combat - ie winning a duel, in a certain context, has counted as a success in a skill challenge.) But other successes would be needed. And of course, if a PC produces the best poetry, but nevertheless (for some reason) loses the contest, that seems potentially interesting in itself. What was going on behind the scenes?This also goes to bigger issues of scene framing. In the poetry competition, how do the other PCs (and players) fit in? I would likely have framed the scene so that the need to compose a poem is only one element of the overall situation. Which again means that a real life beautiful composition is contributing to resolution of only one component of the total situation.</blockquote>

Verification