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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6163814" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Which is awesome. Did you notice how searching for those points and extra dice made the characters actually perform more like the characters they are supposed to be? Does Spiderman fight by standing there and punching? He can, but he usually fights while bouncing all over the place. So, in MHRP, the mechanics encourage you to engage the fiction while describing your action. I have no problem with that. That's much better, IMO, than the typical way such things happen in my D&D experience, where the traditional mechanics seems discourage people from engaging the fiction. (Note that this is not the same as engaging the game. I would conjecture that MHRP's dice mechanics would make it very difficult for a gamist-oriented player to "grok" what is going on and enjoy it.)It takes two seconds for those experienced with the D&D system. I've often seen even reasonably experienced players spend time searching for a +1, and don't even get me started on circumstantial bonuses. Even our group's "guru" recently audited his character and found he had some stuff wrong. Especially with old-school D&D, where you're rolling different dice for everything. Its certainly not like "combats take too long" is an uncommon complaint around here (pick an edition). Additionally, there's a guy at our table (veteran player, too) who really does seem to like engaging the fiction. He's always describing things in great detail. However, he is constantly punished for this, because the Old-School system we're running doesn't care at all. That turns his engagement into either "wasting time" or "fishing for a bonus" in the eyes of some of the other players. The response to "I'm going to try and swipe the legs out from under him." is "That's called rolling an attack."IME, with games like FATE and MHRP, its much harder for D&D players to grasp and get used to than it is for total newbies. Mostly, I think its because D&D "trains" us to view things like this in one particular way. For example, you don't need permission from the MHRP GM to build your dice pool. You describe the intended action, collect dice, then roll. Additionally, the games are much more forgiving for not playing to your highest and brightest numerical abilities, so you don't really need to feel as worried about using a d8 trait instead of a d10 trait as you might for using a less-than-optimal attack or skill in D&D. There's a lot more subtle habits of thought and gameplay that D&D inculcates, but that aren't really necessary in those other games. (Trying to describe them all would make for a very long post.)Now, having said all that, I will also say that this doesn't make these games inherently better or awesome for all players. There will be those who find this kind of thing maddening or simply unfun. Earlier, you said:...and to extent, I can sympathize with this point of view. However, I would say that MHRP is not nearly so close to that extreme as something like Fiasco or Otherkind. (Heck, that almost is the mechanics of Otherkind.) Connecting the mechanics to the fiction in MHRP requires an act of will/intention, just like it does in D&D. However, unlike D&D, MHRP doesn't have the wargame substrate. There is no non-fictional positioning for MHRP. There is not a MHRP physical map to move minis around on (whereas D&D has had actual physical positioning of minis and maps as a common/expected mode for play since the beginning.) In some ways, like I mentioned above with the Spiderman player, this makes games like MHRP more connected to their fiction, because you have to engage the fiction to make sense of them.</blockquote>

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