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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9348489" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's really weird interacting with you because right from the start you held this seemingly solid conviction that I didn't know what I was talking about and whatever opinion I had must be held in ignorance and that I might like what I know rather than knowing what I like.But at the same time you keep confessing your lack of understanding as if the fact that you couldn't tell a battle rifle from a shotgun or your understanding of what a shotgun does based on the worst unrealistic tropes about how a shot gun functions was evidence that I was wrong about the need for rules.Let me try to explain what I'm talking about with climbing without using it as shorthand.  Having some sort of generic athletic or climb check to ascend a wall works really well for short climbs of no more than say twice the height of a typical character.  Yay, you got to the top pass/fail or with complications or swiftly as a critical success and everything is good.  But this approach starts to lose its utility the more climbing something becomes an extended effort.  If a PC proposes to climb a 500 meter cliff, then you've got very few good options as a GM if the only thing in your tool box is that generic athletics check using your core conflict resolution system.   Climbing that cliff is an extended conflict of some sort, and whether you approach it as a single die check and just "roll with it" or whether you approached it as extended skill challenge there are problems and tradeoffs.   Like if you make it a single die check, how far up the cliff did the climber get before failing and potentially falling to their doom?  And does the fact that the climber though strong is Reginald the Short Winded famous for his lack of endurance play a role in the resolution?   And if you do it in multiple rolls, are you making too many opportunities to fail, or can you sustain interest in the conflict resolution of you have to spend 50 rolls doing the climb as the core rules might suggest?If you are interested in this design problem, you might check out the writing of Luke Crane.  He's not my favorite designer, but questions like this did inform the design of Burning Wheel, and so he's obviously thinking hard about these problems.</blockquote>

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