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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3808494" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think it very much depends on what you mean by 'in a workable fashion'.  In the old Chaosium Star Wars system, there were times when it felt so much like the movies that you expected to hear orchestral music break out all around you.  That's as close as I've ever felt any game came to capturing the feel of the material it was based on.  But those were moments, and they were the moments when because of the dice it did not seem as if you possibly could fail no matter how crazy the stuff was that you tried - which in the old dice pool system was sometimes not far from the truth in a way that a linear D20 system never will be.  At other times though, it didn't feel alot like the movies, and that's because it wasn't the movies.  It was a game.   And a game never truly emulates the material.  It creates something which is inspired by the material, but which has the quality of being - for lack of a better word - 'gameable'.  In the comics, if the author wants to pit Superman against Batman, or some other sort of story, he does so and the story happens even if from a gamist perspective such a story makes no sense.  In fact, from a gamist perspective, much of Superman makes no sense.  If he can move from place to place nearly instanteously with reflexes nearly the speed of light, how is he ever taken by surprise by his much much slower moving enemies?  Power of plot, that's how.I have Vance's complete works on my bookshelf.  However inspired by the text it may be, the 1st edition AD&D wizard is not a reproduction or emulation of what is in the text.  Whenever the text suggests something that didn't seem gameable, the text lost out.  I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but if the protagonist is a tragic figure then they have a 100% chance of failure.  Things still happen according to the demands of the story, whereas random numbers don't care what the story is and I think we'll generally agree that the DM shouldn't dictate it.Funnily enough, I'm not sure that this is the crux of our disagreement.  Or if it is, it is different ways of looking at the same thing.It certainly reads like to me that you've just said, "They don't want automatic success, but they want to be able to decide to do anything, no matter how impulsive and outlandish it is, no matter how it flies in the face of reason, physics, and niche protection and succeed just like action heroes."  I'm not sure that that isn't desiring automatic success, but not wanting to know or believe that it is automatic (since if they knew it to be automatic there would be no sense of accomplishment).  You see, they wouldn't improvise unless they thought it had a strong chance of succeeding, and they are I think somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that whatever they want to do they might not be able to do.  I understand those impulses, but ultimately they are impossible goals when it comes to game design.But I think the crux of our disagreement isn't over the likelihood of success, but rather what the degree of success inspires in thier imagination.  It's not really about whether you have a 60% chance of success or a 35% or a 95%.  It's about the 5' gap versus the 15' gap.  It's about the 'merely' heroic versus the superheroic.Except that isn't what it says, and I think the orginal author rightly understood the medium and the audience.  Massaged, the quoted material reads less honestly to me.  Action heroes really can do anything.  Many RPG players really want to be able to do anything, and don't want simply a meaningful chance of success unless by meaningful you mean 'fairly close to 100% but not so close that they are continually reminded that they aren't supposed to fail.'  For them, jumping a 15' gap between swinging metal disks over lava really is more meaningful, exciting, and fun than jumping a 5' gap in the same situation.  For them, they want to jump across after the bad guy even if they made the decision not to play a character whose thing was jumping.  They want to pull the ace of spaces.  They want to win and Baccarat and golf and video games.   They want to hit the bad guy right between the eyes, even though they are playing the crusty doctor.  They want to jump on a cello and slide all the way austria.  They want to play the square jawed merc that beats the bad guy at chess, steals his women, and then beats him soundly in a fair fight in which the bad guy cheats and draws a weapon.But I wonder why we are just confining this to things like that.  For the whole, anything with a meaningful chance of success, surely they should need to have super human strength to?  Why don't we want to make sure that they always have a good chance of pulling the door off the hinges just like the burly barbarian?  Shouldn't strength and constitution and the like also scale upward with level too?It's not that there is necessarily something wrong with wanting that, but I think it comes with a cost that must be paid.</blockquote>

Verification