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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7759142" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I don't think you've taken me out of context.</p><p></p><p>Earlier today I GMed a session of Prince Valiant. Each PC has two ability scores - Brawn and Presence - rated from 1 to 6; and a rating from 0 to 6 across a series of 20-30 skills. Action resolution is tossing a pool of coins equal to the sum of the skill rating (if there is an applicable one) and abiity rating (some skills, like healing, don't take an ability score) - we use dice rather than coins, couting evens as successes - either as an opposed check or against a difficulty number (1 is easy, 4 is hard). Some resolution - combat the obvious example - is extended, with the margin of success applied as a reduction on the other person's pool, generating a "death spiral" effect. There is no resource management, except for keeping track of how many lances your knight might have splintered in jousts!</p><p></p><p>With those rules, plus the skill lists, you could practically run a session of Prince Valiant. You'd need the rules for equipment and other dice pool modifiers - they take a couple of pages.</p><p></p><p>That's what I think a "light" system, based on "naturalistic" extrapolation from infiction situation to resolution, looks like. Not a system with a 400 page SRD!</p><p></p><p>5e has intricate mechanics - spells most obviously, but other class features and feats also - and they correlate to the fiction in various complex and frequently overlapping ways (the Battlemaster/Champion discussion upthread is just one exmple), and also interact with complex resource expenditure and recovery rules, action economy, and other purely mechanical phenomena.</p><p></p><p>(The lightest system I've GMed is Cthulhu Dark - each PC is just a name and a job, with a very simple dice pool resolution system built up out of an occupation die (if applicable), a humanity die (if you're trying something within human capabilities) and a sanity die (if you choose to risk your sanity to succeed). The rules for the game are fewer than 1000 words.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7759142, member: 42582"] I don't think you've taken me out of context. Earlier today I GMed a session of Prince Valiant. Each PC has two ability scores - Brawn and Presence - rated from 1 to 6; and a rating from 0 to 6 across a series of 20-30 skills. Action resolution is tossing a pool of coins equal to the sum of the skill rating (if there is an applicable one) and abiity rating (some skills, like healing, don't take an ability score) - we use dice rather than coins, couting evens as successes - either as an opposed check or against a difficulty number (1 is easy, 4 is hard). Some resolution - combat the obvious example - is extended, with the margin of success applied as a reduction on the other person's pool, generating a "death spiral" effect. There is no resource management, except for keeping track of how many lances your knight might have splintered in jousts! With those rules, plus the skill lists, you could practically run a session of Prince Valiant. You'd need the rules for equipment and other dice pool modifiers - they take a couple of pages. That's what I think a "light" system, based on "naturalistic" extrapolation from infiction situation to resolution, looks like. Not a system with a 400 page SRD! 5e has intricate mechanics - spells most obviously, but other class features and feats also - and they correlate to the fiction in various complex and frequently overlapping ways (the Battlemaster/Champion discussion upthread is just one exmple), and also interact with complex resource expenditure and recovery rules, action economy, and other purely mechanical phenomena. (The lightest system I've GMed is Cthulhu Dark - each PC is just a name and a job, with a very simple dice pool resolution system built up out of an occupation die (if applicable), a humanity die (if you're trying something within human capabilities) and a sanity die (if you choose to risk your sanity to succeed). The rules for the game are fewer than 1000 words.) [/QUOTE]
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