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: 8280852" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed. I posted the same as your second and third sentences upthread. Again, this is why I think the received conventions are so important, together with their relationship to the notion of an "ecology" that I described upthread. Without that "ecology" the conventions become arbitrary and silly (eg why so many rules for doors but none for belts and braces? I mean, if your trousers fall down while swordfighting with an Orc that would be inconvenient at least!)I agree with all this!And this. At a certain point the adjudication ceases to be "free kriegsspiel"-style extrapolation of the fiction - which rests for its effectivness on a combination of expertise on the part of the adjudicator and consensus by all participants that the adjudicator's extrapolations are sound - and becomes just making stuff up. I'm a huge fan of making stuff up, but I want it to be structured/constrained in some fashion - 4e skill challenges are one way of doing that; so is Classic Traveller's framework for determining whether a character comes to grief while doing stuff in a vacc suit (that latter system does rely on consensus that a manoeuvre is "non-ordinary", but some examples are stated to extrapolate from, and so this is a fairly low bar to clear).To go back briefly to the Court of Stars, upthread I referred to NPCs which are knowable and either exploitable or avoidable. As long as NPCs are essentially puzzles with one or two moving parts, and those moving parts are known by convention to be salient - like the evil priest in KotB, who is a threat that can be avoided via detecting evil or even by just declaring we keep an eye on him in case; or a NPC who can be bribed for so-and-so many GPs - then "skilled play" can handle them. We see this in the AD&D and Moldvay Basic evasion rules, which have every pursuing goblin or fire beetle apt to be distracted by discarded baubles or food. But as soon as we move into the realm of genuine interaction or negotiation, like the Court of Stars example or (say) negotiating a peace treaty between Keoland and Bissel, or wooing and proposing marriage, then in my view skilled play comes to an end precisely because puzzle-solving has come to an end. Play is still (hopefully) creative, and focused on the fiction, but the "solutions" are all about making stuff up and that is either unconstrained - in which case the players' skill doesn't really get them anywhere even if dice are occasionally rolled (as per your criticisms of 3E and 5e D&D) - or else is constrained via a "decoupled" resolution process (like 4e or Traveller's vacc suit rules or BW or PbtA or etc, etc, . . .) in which case the idea of resolution via extrapolation from the fiction without dice playing a roll has been abandoned.Needless to say, for me it is that last-described approach to RPGing which I enjoy!</blockquote>

Verification