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: 5260020" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree, and I say this as someone who - unlike you - has had most of his RPGing for the past 20 years consist of GMing the same ten or so people in various combinations.I like the rules to deliver the answers to action resolution questions because it reduces one of the burdens of being a GM (and it's not as if GMs don't have to bear plenty of other burdens!).That's not to say that I think RPGs have to go all simulationist to do this. You can have perfectly consitent ditch-jumping rules in a narrativist ruleset (eg by using Robin Laws's pass/fail cycle to set DCs).Where gaming the GM is inevitable, I suspect, certainly when you play with the same people for years and years and even when you come into a new group, is in thematic/genere/trope choices. My players can be pretty certain that my games will involve ancient empires, scheming gods, mad cults and moral quandries, both from experience and because they know more generally what my tastes in history, philosophy and theology are. So they know that if they build PCs with links to gods or to political power structures they will almost certainly get an easier way in to the themes of the campaign.The solution for this sort of thing is (I think) communication. I always talk to my players about what sort of setting, themes, tropes etc we want to emphasise in a new campaign. The thing is, I'd much rather talk about this sort of stuff - which is often inherently interesting for fantasy fans - than about how I'll resolve ditch-jumping in the absence of a robust action-resolution ruleset.</blockquote>

Verification