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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9199414" data-attributes="member: 7040941">The difference between what the book was referring to by naming those mechanics and their seeming equivalents in genre emulation are aesthetic.For example, given we're talking tabletop games, take 2d6 + Mod versus a TN. This is what AW uses as a core mechanic to resolve Moves, which as you note reinforce film/comic/literary/etc tropes.In 2d6 RPG, the same mechanic is used to resolve different Actions that directly model the individual actions of a character.Now, xdY + n as a mechanic is just a number generator. It doesn't do anything on its own, but its easy way to depress the computational overhead to process and generate a consistent chance of some number appearing.But depending on what one wants to do, it can be used to provide different aesthetics.This is actually where the whole issue of people having to "unlearn" DND to learn PBTA comes from. People used to DND are used to the latter aesthetics of direct action modeling, and when PBTA doesn't constrain people from rolling too much they're going to run into issues of feeling like their character is an idiot when rolls in PBTA produce a negative feedback loop most of the time.Plus, I'd disagree on physics and internal economy being correlative to tropes, at least for the most part. I can see the physics angle for cartoon physics, but I'd wonder if cartoon physics would be worth mechanizing at all.Conflict resolution, sure, depending on what it is. Clocks I'm iffy on, though that might just be my dislike for them.Indeed that was my read as well. I think what Adams had in mind was closer to not just a story being emergent, but all of its components being emergent and then combining to form a story.So you wouldn't model the tropes, they'd just emerge spontaneously on their own.And I don't think that these can't converge without external management (a GM, etc).In fact I'd theorize that if you set up the base mechanics right they'd create a feedback loop that reverberates into a state that hits all of the marks Adams calls for. It'd just be tricky to do this in a video game because it'd need simulate things like talking. Recent developments of AI voices is changing that though, so the pieces are there.I think I covered this above, but Ill also add that genre emulation can go wrong. Ive related the aesthetic issue PBTA tends to have (roll too much > negative feedback loop goes into overdrive > feel like idiot), and thats where we can end up violating the Credible Character requirement. But, that negative feedback loop itself, even when its operating as intended, can violate both Causality and Coherence. Pretty much no story is just endless contrived drama, at least not ones that are considered good. TV Shows run into that problem when they just keep going on forever, and apropos, a lot of PBTA tends to work better as one shots or relatively short campaigns. Hence, why I think PBTA could do with a means of a more rigid turn structure and a roll economy for PCs. In AW, at least, the math of progression could be tweaked so that the drama feedback loop flips to Positive around mid way; that'd help to make the overall play sequence of a campaign correlate better with more typical plot structures. Precisely, which is pretty much a concise explanation for why I bounced so hard off PBTA, but not Ironsworn. Ironsworn was my first exposure to these kinds of games, and the design being solo focused actually masks a lot of these issues. I can see them now of course, and Ive long since adjusted the game to address the aesthetic issues. (Just use higher base stats and I give myself limits to roll)But there really isn't the same benefit in non-outlier PBTA examples. Others combat it in other ways, though; Fellowship for example, while not a game I particularly enjoyed (I just don't care for creative writing as a game), also masks a lot of the issues due to how it splits the authorial stance.</blockquote>

Verification