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Putting The Awe Back In Magic
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7998278" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>These remarks take me right back to this:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"></p><p></p><p>When one thinks of D&D from the point of view of a wargame, the mechanical stability and predictability of magic is a feature. The surprise consists in discovering what challenges the GM has established (sometimes this is very literal, as in, <em>what's behind that door?</em>). Magic is part of the solution, and not itself intended to be a source of surprise or upset.</p><p></p><p>Of course if one takes these wargame/"skilled play"-oriented rules out of that context and tries to use them as a fiction or genre simulator, the fiction won't involve dynamic or scary magic! If you want that, you'll need to hange the rules in some way. But the D&D community seems very conservative in relation to rules, which creates some practical problems here for a commercial publisher.</p><p></p><p>Classic D&D relies upon the GM to exercise judgement in building his/her dungeon. The game offers some general guidelines and frameworks (eg monsters-by-level charts; treasure charts; etc), but it's part of the point of things that the dungeon experience might be different from referee to referee.</p><p></p><p>So I think the word "risk" is misplaced in your posts; and probably also the word "uneven". If you look at the link I posted above to an account of my 4e campaign, you'll see that another poster shared his experiences of running the same module. It played differently in his hands and with his group from how it did in my case.</p><p></p><p>All the games I play require GM judgement at some point. In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, what's the borderline between an ordinary power-use and a "stunt" (which requires a plot point expenditure, but also adds a bonus die to the pool)? When Gandalf's player wanted to slow the orcs he was pursuing, whom he knew to be carrying the (hitherto) lost palantir of Annuminas, he used his knowledge of the arcane and his own sorcerous power to cause the palantir itself to slow them through it's metaphysical burden and the lure of its power. My judgement was that this was a permissible action declaration, but a stunt. Another GM might have (in my view a bit pedantically) held it to be impermissible, because having no direct analogue in LotR; a third GM might have held it to be a regular use of sorcery not counting as a stunt at all.</p><p></p><p>In our Classic Traveller game, one of the PCs with electronics skill wanted to jury-rig his communicator ("reversing the flux capacitor" as the player decribed it) so that it would blog the signal being used by an enemy spotter to relay the PCs' position back to the starship that was firing on them from orbit. Can this be done? And how hard is it? The rules leave that up to the GM. I decided that it can be done - otherwise what's the electronics skill for? - and set a difficulty extrapolated from a single example given in the rulebook.</p><p></p><p>And in our 4e game linked to above, I had to decide (i) whether a moment of possession can be used to extract a password from a victim's mind (I judged that it could) and (ii) what happens when the attempt fails?</p><p></p><p>My overall view is that, provided the maths of the system are robust (and they are in the three systems I've mentioned) then the GM can generally follow the players' lead as to what is possible in the fiction, structure that in appropriate mechanical terms for the system being played, and then (if the action fails) adjudicate appropriately having regard to the system's framework for consequences.</p><p></p><p>Different players will judge different things possibl. Different GMs will apply the system differently (is it a stunt? how difficult is it? etc). And different GMs will narrate different consequences for failure. But that's part-and-parcel of playing a RPG!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7998278, member: 42582"] These remarks take me right back to this: [indent][/indent] When one thinks of D&D from the point of view of a wargame, the mechanical stability and predictability of magic is a feature. The surprise consists in discovering what challenges the GM has established (sometimes this is very literal, as in, [I]what's behind that door?[/I]). Magic is part of the solution, and not itself intended to be a source of surprise or upset. Of course if one takes these wargame/"skilled play"-oriented rules out of that context and tries to use them as a fiction or genre simulator, the fiction won't involve dynamic or scary magic! If you want that, you'll need to hange the rules in some way. But the D&D community seems very conservative in relation to rules, which creates some practical problems here for a commercial publisher. Classic D&D relies upon the GM to exercise judgement in building his/her dungeon. The game offers some general guidelines and frameworks (eg monsters-by-level charts; treasure charts; etc), but it's part of the point of things that the dungeon experience might be different from referee to referee. So I think the word "risk" is misplaced in your posts; and probably also the word "uneven". If you look at the link I posted above to an account of my 4e campaign, you'll see that another poster shared his experiences of running the same module. It played differently in his hands and with his group from how it did in my case. All the games I play require GM judgement at some point. In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, what's the borderline between an ordinary power-use and a "stunt" (which requires a plot point expenditure, but also adds a bonus die to the pool)? When Gandalf's player wanted to slow the orcs he was pursuing, whom he knew to be carrying the (hitherto) lost palantir of Annuminas, he used his knowledge of the arcane and his own sorcerous power to cause the palantir itself to slow them through it's metaphysical burden and the lure of its power. My judgement was that this was a permissible action declaration, but a stunt. Another GM might have (in my view a bit pedantically) held it to be impermissible, because having no direct analogue in LotR; a third GM might have held it to be a regular use of sorcery not counting as a stunt at all. In our Classic Traveller game, one of the PCs with electronics skill wanted to jury-rig his communicator ("reversing the flux capacitor" as the player decribed it) so that it would blog the signal being used by an enemy spotter to relay the PCs' position back to the starship that was firing on them from orbit. Can this be done? And how hard is it? The rules leave that up to the GM. I decided that it can be done - otherwise what's the electronics skill for? - and set a difficulty extrapolated from a single example given in the rulebook. And in our 4e game linked to above, I had to decide (i) whether a moment of possession can be used to extract a password from a victim's mind (I judged that it could) and (ii) what happens when the attempt fails? My overall view is that, provided the maths of the system are robust (and they are in the three systems I've mentioned) then the GM can generally follow the players' lead as to what is possible in the fiction, structure that in appropriate mechanical terms for the system being played, and then (if the action fails) adjudicate appropriately having regard to the system's framework for consequences. Different players will judge different things possibl. Different GMs will apply the system differently (is it a stunt? how difficult is it? etc). And different GMs will narrate different consequences for failure. But that's part-and-parcel of playing a RPG! [/QUOTE]
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