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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5063400" data-attributes="member: 2067">Which can be frustrating, but it certainly matches reality well. In reality, the first person to stick a sword in their enemies wins, pretty much right then and there. For certain styles of game (grim & gritty, for instance), this is entirely a feature. It's not for everyone, but it's not inherently a bad thing.I'd peg it as a very binary game. One turn decides everything. That's not necessarily swingy (it's not random), but it shares the fault of extremely swingy systems in that it is boringly extreme. Poker dodges the binary bullet, but can still be very swingy. The interesting design in Poker from this perspective is that people determine how swingy they want each hand to be via the mechanic of the bet. Swinginess plays a key role in the strategy: did that guy just go all in because he's got a killer hand, or did he go all in as a bluff? If you're making smaller bets, it's less swingy. This means that Poker has a pacing to it, and that pacing is set by players at the table. As the bets get higher, each decision becomes more important, because the swing gets steeper and steeper, becoming more and more extreme, until finally the hand is called and the tension is released. I wonder what a game would look like if we took that element of "player-dictated swinginess" and added it to a fantasy PnP RPG like D&D? Say, your HP becomes your bank, and in each combat in a day(each hand), you can choose to wager a certain amount of HP. No one can make you loose HP you didn't put up. If you flee combat, you fold (you loose the HP you put up), but if you win combat, that HP comes back to you, and you ALSO gain rewards from the HP everyone else put up (perhaps that determines your XP and GP and treasure and the like). But, your enemies (the DM's party) can also fold, depriving you of those rewards. The key in such a system would be unpredictability; the players should never know exactly what powers they get to use, and they should never know exactly what powers the DM gets to use. If you were the stronger party, you would want to fake weakness so you'd get a better reward; if you were the weaker party, you might flee, or you might try to seem better than you really are. The combat would hinge on which party really is the stronger or the weaker (which could be slightly random, like a game of Texas Hold 'Em, or less so, like 5 Card Stud), but that's not something either party would know until all bets are placed.Probably needs some work, and it probably isn't ideal for core D&D (which has a legacy of HP attrition to adhere to), but it's fun to think about appropriating these mechanical elements.</blockquote>

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