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="pemerton" data-source="post: 8426144" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think it's widely recognised that the need for RPG books (especially GM manuals) to serve as mini-encyclopaedias has passed.In a Classic Traveller session that I GMed last year, the PCs were blasting/drilling through 4 km of ice. Their available tools included a triple beam laser turret. We wanted to know how long it took them - in Traveller this matters because it goes to upkeep costs (modest), crew salaries (a bit more than modest), ship repayments if in issue (currently not for this group of collectors of used starships), and also how long I have as referee for my various NPCs spread over multiple worlds to take action "offscreen".To work it out, we Googled up some papers reporting on using lasers to melt ice and extrapolated wildly from those.I don't think that makes us FKRer, though. Even back before Google, playing Rolemaster, I remember using actual encyclopaedias to answer questions about (eg) animal mass and speed; and using the expertise of the engineers at the table to resolve other technical questions. (And in another recent Traveller session I remember one of the engineers at the table face-palming multiple times in response to my narration of something-or-other involving electric fields, where I was trying to reconcile some aspect of a module setting I was using with some other bit of framing I was doing!)This isn't obvious to me. In real life I have a lot of knowledge about things I'm familiar with: eg I know how many exams I can mark per hour or per day. I know that I can run about 12 km in about 1 hour, but probably not 24 km in 2 hours! I know that I can standing two-legged jump up my Town Hall steps 3 at a time but probably not 4 at a time without risking injury!I choose these examples because they correlate to the sort of issues of personal capacity that [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] has pointed to in relation to climbing.How important are these sorts of things in RPG resolution? Well, in a system like 4e's skill challenges, hardly at all, because the resolution framework operates independently of these sorts of fictional details (eg I declare I'm marking all the exams, and if I succeed on an INT or CON check as seems appropriate then I get them done, otherwise something goes wrong - depending on context the failure might be narrated as me falling asleep, or getting too bored to keep going, or some external interruption like a fire alarm, which did happen to me once). The fiction has a big impact on framing, and a big impact on consequences, but not a big impact on the actual resolution process.In a system like Rolemaster or AD&D, this sort of detail often matters a fair bit, and outcomes can turn on whether or not a character is able to deliver a performance that is above the human minimum but not necessarily at the human maximum for the endeavour in question. (The actual way RM handles this is incredibly baroque: PCs have a static movement rate, derived from PC height and the Quickness stat; they have a Sprinting skill bonus; they have a Jumping skill bonus; how those bonuses are used to derive performance is extremely unclear, with multiple published subsystems none of which is fully transparent. I think Burning Wheel is far superior in this respect, with consistent resolution rules and less attempt at feet-per-second granularity.)This issue of individual capability is applicable to horses and starships too. In real life some horses are hungrier and/or faster than others; some vehicles and some weapons perform better than others. Both RPG rules and encyclopaedias tend to flatten out this real-life variation.To me, this sounds like a stripped-back RuneQuest (or similar "reallism"-oriented system with transparent PC gen).</blockquote>

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