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: 9867406" data-attributes="member: 42582">Two friends are arguing about where to go for dinner. They toss a coin to resolve the dispute. That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter - if it didn't matter, there'd be no disagreement because no one would care!I don't know what the "it" is in this sentence.This isn't true of Burning Wheel, or Torchbearer, or Marvel Heroic RP, or Prince Valiant, or Mythic Bastionland - just thinking of some of the RPGs I've played or thought about recently.BW, TB2e and Prince Valiant use a difficulty/obstacle number to represent difficulty; not a die roll. Mythic Bastionland uses  consequences to represent difficulty (eg doing this thing will cost you 1d6 Vigour; or, if you fail this save you will lose 1d10 Spirit). Marvel Heroic doesn't really represent difficulty at all - it represent opposition either in the form of a being (statted the same as a PC) or the current degree of threat/tension in the form of the Doom Pool.This seems to me to describe an action, or a goal - that is the something for which the player takes a risk. The dice roll doesn't represent that. It's subsequent to that, and is a way of deciding whether or how the risk crystallises.The dice don't represent the element of fortune. They are the element of fortune.Who said the roll is meaningless? Not me. I said it doesn't represent anything in the fiction. It's a decision procedure.<a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">As Vincent Baker said</a>, over two decades ago,Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. . . . Plenty of suggestions at the game table don't get picked up by the group, or get revised and modified by the group before being accepted, all with the same range of time and attention spent negotiating. . . . Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.In some sorts of task-resolution oriented systems, based heavily around creating a shared imagining of ingame causal processes, I think it's perhaps true to say that the dice represent otherwise unspecified elements of the fiction - Rolemaster is the game of this sort that I know best, but RuneQuest would be another example. Though I know from experience that this gets pretty tricky: for instance, does the roll to hit with an arrow in an archery contest reflect a sudden gust of wind, or an insect settling on the archer's nose as they loose their arrow? Maybe - but this sort of game aspires to model all that stuff as inputs into the roll (there are rules in RM, for instance, for the effects of wind on archery), and so the representational reading of the dice undercuts a core ethos of the game. (Again, this is not mere speculation - it's something I've experienced in playing RM.)This is why, as I posted upthread, My starting point is that the randomiser doesn't represent anything: it's a decision procedure, not a model.</blockquote>

Verification