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: 5665135" data-attributes="member: 42582">KM, all of what you say here presupposes simulationist mechanics (ie the mechanics model the ingame causal processes). Which are fine if that's what one wants, but not the only way to go about things.As soon as we think of the mechanics in metagame terms, we can think of other ways to deal with some of the issues you raise. For example, Mearls' "you must be this tall to ride" system increases player certainty as to whether or not their PCs can succeed at challenges. As you point out, though, sometimes the unskilled get lucky and succeed at stuff despite their lack of training. This can be incorporated into a system like Mearls's by giving some sort of Fate Point resource, which a player can spend to raise training by 1 rank for a single check. This both (i) achieves the metagame goal of player certainty and (ii) achieves the goal of verisimilitudinous fiction - occasionally even unskilled heroes get lucky.Now some player clearly like the idea that you can roll for a 20! Ie, they want the chance to gamble rather than the sort of certainty Mearls's system provides. And this might be a good reason not to go with his system. But I prefer to look at the pros and cons of his system in terms of the sorts of expectations it favours and experiences it permits at the table. From this point of view, your criticism becomes not that it doesn't permit lucky successes within the fiction, but that if it does so, it does so via non-simulationist mechanics, and/or that if it does so, it doesn't necessarily preserve the dimension of luck as part of the play experience at the table.</blockquote>

Verification