Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6199021" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Considering I'm one of the advocates you mention, I'm going to veto your take here.  In the totality of my experience and presently at my table:- Versimilitude is an illusive concept.  One man's versimilitude is another man's fiddly, silly, "gamey", unfulfilling, or overwrought.- Tight PC<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />C balance, and tight PC:challenge balance makes it easier for me to emulate genre and to focus on the drama, pacing and climax as I'm freeing up undue mental overhead that would be spent on forcing balance a priori or manipulating it mid-stream to instead focus on genre-relevant material/tropes that yields dynamic scene openers, compelling challenges, and complications born of the output of PC action meeting the machinery of the resolution mechanics.- Yes, tight PC<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />C and PC:challenge balance does indeed reduce the impetus toward mastery of system and does tend to be at tension against building powerful characters that break the math of the game.  This is also a feature for my table.- I'm not sure of "sparing the feelings of whichever people cannot deal with the idea that  their character might not be the best but are simultaneously unwilling  to build one that is" but I do suppose it spares certain players' feelings in that it generally equillibrates spot-light sharing and again, my own feelings, as its an emergent quality of play rather than one I force/impose.Due to my nature and my work, I'm not a big fan of "eyeballed" or "kinda sorta" calibration.  I want tight, explicit math and error bars.  Wide confidence intervals make me twitch.  I don't want to twitch while I'm running a leisure activity/game because the downside of fuzzy challenge math is TPK...accidentally...or BBEG anti-climactically crushed in 2 rounds...accidentally.  I want to focus on the creative side of the game and on composing compelling, genre-relevant scenes/challenges that my players can engage with and resolve.  Tight math lets me do that.  Its equal parts functional for play and equal parts anxiety-reducing placebo.</blockquote>

Verification