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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4816748" data-attributes="member: 3146">I thought I would find both examples ridiculous. I certainly find the first example so ludicrous it is painful to read, let alone imagine participating in a game like that.The second example, on the other hand, seems much more interesting. When I went back and re-read it to be fair, it sounded like it flowed and told a good story. It also helps that, for the most part, it operates at a level of abstraction that allows gossip, innuendo and reputation to be a part of the encounter so you don't imagine that every roll represents a specific speech.That said, I would be extremely wary about adopting such an approach in an actual game. The immense challenge of using and applying such a system would be to make the system reward and punish the right strategies in the right situations. A system for simulating modern combat that made mass charges over open ground against machine gun emplacements a good idea would be a bad system. It seems difficult to believe that a system for codifying the far more complex world of social interactions would not inevitably end up with situations that are equally ridiculous. Family honor works as a defensive ability in a fictional tribal society. Transplant that system into 21st century San Francisco and it seems pretty silly. I am sure that most attributes, benefits or abilities you could come up with would be similarly culturally dependent. Which is fine until you want to model a crosscultural encounter or if you want to use the system outside of the specific, carefully crafted setting it is written for. An argument that convinces the Spartan elders might well be laughed out of the agora in Athens. (Though it would not necessarily work out that way--Alcibiades was equally effective or ineffective (depending upon your point of view) in both cities).</blockquote>

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