NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8416464" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I read Dark Empires.  Interesting.  These are my takeaways:* Its mostly unstructured freeform with encoded GMing and player best practices and principles.* Where there is structure, it is comparatively lithe.  I typically call non-agenda/principles rules (the integration of action/conflict resolution mechanics + PC build mechanics + incentive structures) "the system's say."  "The system's say" in this game is extremely lean.  For instances, let us say something like Apocalypse World had the following zero sum "say" spread for system, MC, and players; 3 / 3 / 4.  My takeaway from reading Dark Empires (and if I were to run it based on this document) would be the following zero sum "say spread for system, GM, and players; 1 / 6 / 3.  In other words, a lot of "say" has been removed from system, some say has been removed from players, and the GM's say has been increased significantly.* There will be a "skilled play" factor for players that increases with exposure to the GM's interpretation and attendant manifestation of many things fiction + action resolution/gamestate consequence; the ficklness/subtlety/dangerousness of magic, what double-crosses/duplicity looks like and how well and through what means it can be sussed out, how stealth and deception work in moving the trajectory of play, how effective gear is in any move made and how burdensome it is, how hardy and capable a PC is in dealing with physical threats and how that threat scaling works.  If you want to look at it like Blades in the Dark Position and Effect or Aliens Degrees of Success/Failure/Panic, the GM has to derive this through play and map these concepts onto degrees of success.  The players then have to model this for subsequent orientation to obstacles and their attendant action declarations downstream of their exposure to the GM's adjudication of these things.  In theory, this should allow players to improve over time in their inferences of their PC's orientation to elements within the fiction and what any given action declaration > resolution > consequence loop might look like.  This is how living creatures with neurological systems work.  They poke and prod at their environment in order to build up a sufficient model to make predictions and improve their confidence in their OODA Loop.  In their endocrine system has its say.  Going into the first session of play with a GM, the predictive capacity of any given player's model won't be terribly high.  As exposure to GM and game conceits increases, that predictive capacity should (in theory) increase in some proportion.</blockquote>

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