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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5632620" data-attributes="member: 82106">Playing gadfly for a moment...The entire combat rules of Holmes' Basic (and the original D&D alternate combat system it is a rewrite of) actually take up less word count than the 2 sidebars you cite. Yet I have never heard any complaint about Basic D&D that people had doubts about how to put on a combat or required guidelines. Nor is there any 'economy' beyond the action economy and hit points (and daily spell resources if you will).I'm not convinced that more kinds of points and chits and whatnot adds anything significant. I think true tension and drama always come out of the story itself. Even things like HQ or BW story mechanics don't make a story tense or engaging. They can present queues to the players. I think that is the MAIN virtue of these things, they prime the participants and tell them "the game expects you to try to pull some crazy thing off here, and the GM is going to give you a chance, now and then." The elements of drama have to be there, the players have to be engaged enough to care, and then they need to be prodded somehow.Again, though I come back to my earlier point. Basic's combat system could exist on a single page BECAUSE everyone is already very clear about what combat is, it has clear roles (protagonist, antagonist) and clear goals (kill the other guy before he kills you), and clear ground rules (hitting people with sharpened metal poles kills them). Clearly the material in the 4e books missed the mark in terms of explaining that the same needs to be true of a conflict situation regardless of whether it is a combat or not. I think the flaw with the way SCs are presented is that they talk about the mechanics before establishing (and then fail to really establish) these things. There's no real discussion of the elements of conflict, establishing the context, establishing roles in the scene, making the goals clear, and establishing the ground rules of the situation. At best the examples and advice fumble their way towards this. The description of skill uses for instance establishes some ground rules, but in an awkward form that is more limiting than enabling. There is also a failure IMHO to properly address framing of a challenge. There's just the 'make sure everyone has a skill they can use', but the way this advice is written it is basically like saying "make up some rationalization for rewarding a character with a success when he uses one of his skills that has no obvious applicability" instead of actual framing, which would be "create new story elements to allow the challenge to encompass things relevant to each character's sphere of competency."I have mixed feelings about the '3 strikes' core SC mechanic. It has certain virtues. It is simple for the players to grasp, works well for smaller 'extended skill check' kind of challenges, and actually works pretty well for a lot of larger challenges, especially the 'action adventure' sorts where you go chasing around. The idea that it induces people to sit out has merit though, and many things which seem like they could use SC-like mechanics don't work well with a simple counting mechanism. You can reframe constantly to get to the point where the challenge DOES work that way, but I think it would be better if the SC system simply got a more flexible core mechanic.</blockquote>

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