Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="thefutilist" data-source="post: 9520575" data-attributes="member: 7044566">Yeah that's exactly what I mean you've got the nail on the head. And yeah my example was of a generative consequence.I disagree rather strongly with Vincent. I'm not saying the phenomena he's talking about didn't occur but I think he's misdiagnosing it.(the following comes across as ranty, I'm not directing the invective at you)Circa 2009 -2014 I was reading the Forge, Story-games and playing Indie games. I had nowhere near the grasp of mechanics that I do now and so I was confusing lots of things and I saw a lot of other people, on forums and in person, confuse a lot of things.A load of people didn't know what conflict resolution was (myself included) and so they confused it with a lot of other stuff.A load of people were trying to deal with the 'bad' GM problem. The whole thing where you tied intent + task and then roll for intent was a way of mitigating that. There is an example on Anyway, if I recall correctly the example is something like:There are secret papers in the safe or so the player thinks. So the intent is to get the secret papers and they succeed at opening the safe but don't get the intent. GM's who wanted to railroad pulled this all the time in badly run trad games. So a lot of people wanted to mechanize who gets authority. To the degree that when stake setting started getting popular, resolution was seen by a lot of people (including me) as a way to give authority.This all had an impact on the way the literary nature of the fiction was interpreted.If someone cares about their guy getting his way and this is tied up in authority then what you're doing matters less far less then the goal. In a literary sense though, this is absolute garbage.I've been in games where the following is disallowed.I plead with the guards to let us pass. I appeal to their sense of basic human decency. Yes the King might execute them but sometimes you have to take risks to do the right thing. (Roll a fail). So the guards don't let us pass.Ok I threaten the guards then. They can die when the King finds out or they can die now. (no wait you can't do that, you've already rolled to see if you can get past them)Escalation across moral lines (one of the fundamentals of thematic story telling, ends up going in the bin)So that's a long winded way of saying that if you care about what's someone's doing, rather than intent, you won't disconnect in the way that Vincent suggests. It would be ludicrous to do so.If you don't care (don't appreciate it on a literary level or are hung up on authority or something), then adding teeth isn't going to get you to care.Vincent singles out In A Wicked Age as having this problem and people (myself included), played In A Wicked Age in really silly ways. This has very little to do with the text though and a lot to do with people not really being able to distinguish between various resolution methods.If In A Wicked Age contained an essay about literary conflict resolution and a load more examples, I think people would have played it more in line with how Vincent envisioned it. IAWA has the exact same trigger for conflict as Sorcerer and they both involve being able to identify a literary conflict of interest occurring in response to an action taken by a character. If people can skip that (and I used to) then there's bigger problems going on that usable game rules.</blockquote>

Verification