Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9346387" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is nothing wrong with having widely applicable core proposition resolution rules, such as a well thought out skill system.  I'm just highly skeptical that such a thing can be created that well treats with diverse situations.  Invariably, you are going to introduce abstractions and simplifications into your core rules that work well with your core gameplay loops, but which won't work in situations where the underlying nature of the thing being approximated is fundamentally different than what you envisioned.It would vastly help me if there were as well thought out of supplements as, "Rules for Chases" or "Rules for Athletic Contests" (or maybe just contests) or a well play-tested "Tome of Natural Hazards" or "The Big Book of Equipment and how to Craft It".  Heck even such things as, "Yes, we have a climb skill but what's are your options when a player proposes to climb a 500 foot cliff?" or "Yes, we have a stealth skill, but how should you run stealth based scenarios?" are things that I'd love good discussion of in a game system.  How is it that those things wouldn't help you?  How is that after 40 years of gaming, you haven't run a game of Luna rules Zero-G football?  How many experiences do you think you and heck everyone are short on?  Because I feel like I'm short of a lot despite 40 years of regular gaming.  Do we really need another variety of game inspired by BECMI to do the same sort of gaming that was possible with BECMI?One of the best thing about both the 1e AD&D era and the 3e D&D area is that people were looking for niches to publish in.  And in both eras I encountered rules niches where, even if the rules weren't as well thought out as I'd like, they made me realize that there were whole areas of storytelling I was unconsciously avoiding because the rules were silent on them and so I'd given them no thought.  I was running with what was possible under the rules or what was easy under the rules, and I'd assumed that was all that was possible.As early as my late teens, I had lucky eureka moments where I realized that I could do better when running an arm wrestling contest than have it come down to a single die roll and I invented the concept of what we would later call a skill challenge on the fly because I realized that the players would have more fun with it if it was ran like a contest with incremental successes and failures leading to an outcome.  It would be more dramatic.  And it was.  Nothing in the rules of 1e AD&D could have told me to do that, I just happened to make the right call in that moment.   At this point, designers should be able to get there ahead of me, and too often they find they don't.  I spend way too much time having to rethink rules in popular systems, and a lot of time wondering why people's passion project is just another lightweight system that doesn't do much and leaves most things up to fiat.   I read rules that are often pretty well organized but all they are doing is some pretty basic proposition->fortune->resolution loops.  And yes, that covers the majority of what happens most of the time at most tables, but it doesn't cover everything.</blockquote>

Verification