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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5477326" data-attributes="member: 957">I have negative interest in playing in a game that works the way you describe here.  You like it.  That is cool."Absurd" is kinda a loaded word.  But will you at least agree that this is a perfect example of the narrative being forced to obey the mechanics?Why are there three cards?  Because of some narrative basis?  No, the premise of the discussion is that this is a mechanical constraint.What if a character spends twenty consecutive days in a hilly, region with lots of chasms.  And every day he finds the need to jump over chasms frequently.  Would it not get funny to you that it always becomes impossible to jump after three successes?  If you were reading a book or watching a show and that pattern appeared, would you not find that odd?  What if someone needed to jump the same two chasms five times a day for twenty days?  Does being forced to invent a constant reasons why not ever start to seem contrary to the point of a role playing game?  It does to me.  It does in a real hurry.  If there IS a reason, then cool, there is a reason.  But running out of cards which have zero implicit narrative meaning being a justification becomes, in my view, something that could reasonably be called absurd.If you were going to write a novel, would you put this kind of constraint on the action?I guess "absurd" strongly depends on context.  If you WANT to play a game with this type of constraint, then NOT using them would be absurd.  But if you want to play a narrative dominant RPG, then forcing this kind of mechanical dominance onto it would be absurd.  The two sides can both exist.I see you saying it is ok because there *could* be reasons why someone couldn't jump more than three times.  But, no one is disputing that there could be reasons.  (And you keep suggesting the problem is related to having trouble making up reasons.  I assure you that is way off the mark.  I am quite confident that pawsplay and RC could give you a list of 100 unique reasons for not being able to jump if they felt motivated, and I know I could.)But, the thing is, just as there *could* be reasons that no more than three occur in a specific given day, there *could* also be reasons that four, or eight, or nineteen are possible in that day.  We are not saying that a limit of three can't happen.  But you are saying that any number exceeding three can't happen.  You are the one eliminating possibilities and saying that no justification which *allows* jumping more than three times may be included.  We have all of the above, lets see what makes sense at the time.  You have a prejudged absolute of three before your players ever open their mouths.We don't look at the world as arbitrarily deterministic.  There is the old, very basic concept.  You flip a normal coin three times and get heads all three times.  What is the odds of getting heads on the fourth flip?  The correct answer is 50%.  In your game the odds of a fourth heads is 0% because you have used up the three heads for the day.  You can make up reasons why it keeps landing on tails the rest of the day.  I can too.  But I REALLY don't want to.  And just as each coin flip is independent, it is very rational for each jump to be independent.  A guy jumps four times in a row and you want to declare him too tired on the fourth.  Cool.  A guy jumps three times in a row, rests for five hours and tries to make an easier jump.  Your system demands that he can't.  Yes, you can invent a reason.  But the reality of your system is that that events are not independent.  You are making up a reason NOT because your understanding of the narrative makes that right, but because this coin flip is not independent of the three other, otherwise remote and unrelated coin flips.Your correct claim that non-absurd narrative justifications can be shoe-horned back onto the mechanical demands does nothing to change that the non-independence of events carries a level of absurdity with it.Again, if you WANT that game experience, then for THAT game experience there is nothing absurd about it.  Your approach is absolutely a role playing game experience.  Immersion is absolutely possible by your approach.  But I don't buy the idea that arbitrary mechanical dominance provides the same opportunity for quality of narrative experience.    If narrative immersion was the true top goal, then forgetting mechanics as much as possible would be a key part of pursuing that goal.  That is NOT a claim that narrative immersion over mechanics is better, more fun, or any of that.  But it is a claim that you can't have it both ways.</blockquote>

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