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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6584832" data-attributes="member: 85870">I can see how my comments might be seen as contradictory---"I don't want to be beholden to process sim so I can push forward the story elements, but I really like process sim!" I think what I was trying to get at is that with Savage Worlds, I find it easier to interpret "fail forward" or "say yes or roll the dice" instances because the nature of the system itself gives me a clear indication of 1) what the characters are inherently capable of relative to the game world, and 2) the players know how to interpret that capability when making their choices in game. In this sense, it is a fairly linear "process sim"---"I want to hack that computer, I have a relative skill of X, my character is fairly certain under the circumstances that (s)he has a reasonable chance of success." Roll the dice, process the degree of success or failure (which Savage Worlds has hard-coded into the rules), interpret the results. But what does this have to do with creative fictional positioning? The point I was trying to make is that the combination of simple, elegant process sim + player freedom in realizing a character concept builds a natural sense of fictional positioning for both the GM and player. Once players understand the basic premise / genre / background in which their characters live, in Savage Worlds they tend to drive their own "fictional positions," and then act in ways that support their positions. For example, in my current game, one of the players is playing a guy in his mid-50s, who specializes in electronic gadgetry, who's unlucky (has one less fortune point / "Benny" to spend per session than the other players), who developed some moderate combat and shooting skill as a con man and former biker. This is all fully supported by in-game mechanics, that when "activated" in fairly typical process-sim ways, reinforce where he is. I don't have to build fictional positioning around him, it's already there, codified in the way his character is expressed based on the rules.4e actually probably hits the same notes, in that the mechanical expressions of class / race / powers / destiny choices "push" the character to a natural fictional position. Moreso than D&D 3e pushes characters into that position, since D&D 3e lacks the embedded keywords in 4e powers, and in many cases 3e's class, feat, and skill combos simply fail to realize the concept. (The whole "defender" idea, as noted earlier, is actually pretty dang hard to create in D&D 3).Another problem I always had with D&D 3 was how quickly the numbers scaled beyond reasonable interpretive results. "Really, you have a +17 to stealth at level 4? Wow, um, okay....." When a player's character sheet basically says they're the equivalent of the world's greatest ninja at stealth at 4th level, how am I supposed to process that in terms of placing the character within the fiction? "Bounded accuracy" was 5e's way of addressing this, I think; Savage Worlds does the same by specifically limiting the codified upper boundary of skill (you can't have a skill higher than a d12).Now does any of this lead to a truly Narrativist, "Story Now" game session? Not really. I'm not trying to get my players to buy in to a "dramatic premise," and force all of the action to examine that premise. But having characters that naturally gravitate toward fictional positions---and having the system support it naturally, with plausible mechanical results---makes it easier for me to introduce scene frames (and elements within those frames) that carry more fictional, narrative weight. I have much more time to insert plot hooks, NPC motivations, setting elements, etc. that back up and reinforce the PC's positioning. In this regard, I think 4e and Savage Worlds are very similar. In fact, the relative ease of GM-ing for both of these systems may be more of a factor than the process sim vs. genre convention effects of the mechanics themselves.</blockquote>

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