Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9230200" data-attributes="member: 59">So, I mentioned players hiding intentions for action declarations and declaring actions algorithmically.  For me, at my table, these would both be examples of dysfunctional play in most games.  (I'd be inclined to be less bothered with them in more adversarial games, like if I were running old tournament modules or something similar.)If a player makes an action declaration and hides their intention, what are we resolving in play?  What's the situation?  I wasn't driving at the possibility of multiple intentions, because, if the player's hiding their intention because they have two intentions (or, God help me, more) and haven't picked what they want out of their action declaration, we're all in the soup — the best case scenario is that I've framed things poorly, they just don't know what to do next, and we're going to muddle around for a bit until we can get back on track.  I actually think a player declaring actions algorithmically is even worse in most situations because there's an intentionality to it and a hostile undertone — the player has a clear endpoint they're aiming at, which I would argue is their intent, but we're going to resolve a series of tasks that solve that intent partially in order for the player to avoid bad/unexpected consequences?  Tell me what you want, and we'll figure out how to resolve it fairly.  Maybe it's multiple rolls, but maybe it's not.  (Burning Wheel handles this sort of thing pretty elegantly with linked tests, though I think the consensus is that there's a danger of overusing them? At least I seem to recall advice to that end somewhere, either on their messageboards or in one of the books.)</blockquote>

Verification