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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5477005" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure what is being asserted here. The most natural reading, for me, entails that HeroWars/Quest, or even The Riddle of Steel, is not a RPG, or is at odds with the point of a RPG. Is that's what is intended?Why do I say that this entailment holds? Because in both those games, in a swordfight, how well a PC does against an NPC will depend, in part, on the relationship (emotional/spiritual/political/etc) between PC and NPC. And not because the designers of the game think that, in the world according to its physics, connections produce toughter sword swings. It's because part of the point of both games is to reflect the significance of emotional/spiritual/political stakes directly in the mechanics.On the issue of absurdity - there is nothing absurd about 3 jump cards. It is completely conceivable that an adventurer might succeed at overcoming only 3 challenges per day/session/encounter/etc by jumping - because all the other chasms are too big, or too wet on the approach, or the adventurer is too fatigued, or whatever. In a game based on jump card, part of the point of the game is to require players and GM to produce narrations that explain these ingame constraints that bring the world of the game into conformity with the metagame-determined possibilities. This applies equally to narrating the relationship-influenced swordfight described above - in a fight in which the PC is doing better because of the augment provided by relationship attributes (in HeroWars/Quest) or by Spiritual Attributes (in TRoS), the ingame situation has to be described as one in which that PC strikes truer, or harder, or luck turns against the foe and the NPC slips, or fails to parry, or . . .And yes, this may require the player to adopt the position of author rather than actor (for anyone interested in a sophisticated discussion of various stances in an RPG, and how they related to immesion, see <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/" target="_blank">here</a>). But it doesn't follow from that that the game is absurd or not a RPG.That's why I asked earlier, when it was said that a RPG should do this or that, the assertion was that it should do this, if Raven Crowking (or Pawsplay, or whomever) is to enjoy it - which I have no reason to doubt is true - or if the assertion was that if it doesn't do this it is failing as a RPG - which I have no reason to suppose is true, given that many great RPGs don't handle physical interactions in the gameworld by using mechanics that model those interactions, but instead by using mechanics that set the constraints of narrating ingame events.</blockquote>

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