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Weekly Wrecana : The Three Pilasters of D&D 4 parts
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8401213" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>I look at it this way, if a player starts picking up dice and rolling them and doing whatever and using that to decide how they drive their part of the fiction, that's perfectly fine. When I say "no dice are rolled" I'm saying that there's no mechanical dice rolling framework which is applied in any situation in which there isn't a conflict. I don't do 'stand alone checks' as a mechanical thing.</p><p></p><p>As I say, that's fine in the sense that a player (or the GM for that matter) is welcome to fiddle around with some dice and use that as input to their story telling. What I don't see as being a good idea is mandating some sort of subsystems that take the place of getting to the interesting situations and building a good story. If "can they finish it now?" is REALLY important, then its a Challenge (SC in 4e parlance, basically, though I have some additional techniques). If its just some side project that the character is working on, well, then sure, roll some dice, maybe they finished it this week, maybe it will be next week after they come back from dungeon level 12 or whatever. I mean, the resulting stories might turn out differently, but the consequences of finish now vs later is undefined, so it isn't like its vital.</p><p></p><p>Yeah, Wrecan and I never did quite see eye-to-eye on a lot of game design things. He did have some pretty interesting ideas in a general game-theoretical design sense, but I was never that fond of the idea of larding more and more different sorts of mechanics out there and defining a ton of different types of situations like this. Simple generality wins, IMHO. </p><p></p><p>My idea for managing relationships and whatnot is to kind of fuse the SC and disease track ideas together. In fact I consider that a design goal which I haven't dug into yet to just make the two things into one. I mean, basically disease track (and the artifact concordance track, which is basically the same thing if you think about it) is pretty much a FitD 'clock'. So, then there's the question of how to engineer things. Should these things adhere to the general model of an SC with 2 tallies, or should the SC model be restructured so that the 'track' (clock) is basic building block and a classic SC is just an instantiation of that with 2 tracks? The later structure does have the appeal of giving you more options, but then the question becomes why one would use it if the avowed purpose of mechanics is to regulate conflict? I guess you could even further generalize the whole thing as 'resource tracks', and then it could even subsume things like hit points and surges, etc. hmmmmmm.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8401213, member: 82106"] I look at it this way, if a player starts picking up dice and rolling them and doing whatever and using that to decide how they drive their part of the fiction, that's perfectly fine. When I say "no dice are rolled" I'm saying that there's no mechanical dice rolling framework which is applied in any situation in which there isn't a conflict. I don't do 'stand alone checks' as a mechanical thing. As I say, that's fine in the sense that a player (or the GM for that matter) is welcome to fiddle around with some dice and use that as input to their story telling. What I don't see as being a good idea is mandating some sort of subsystems that take the place of getting to the interesting situations and building a good story. If "can they finish it now?" is REALLY important, then its a Challenge (SC in 4e parlance, basically, though I have some additional techniques). If its just some side project that the character is working on, well, then sure, roll some dice, maybe they finished it this week, maybe it will be next week after they come back from dungeon level 12 or whatever. I mean, the resulting stories might turn out differently, but the consequences of finish now vs later is undefined, so it isn't like its vital. Yeah, Wrecan and I never did quite see eye-to-eye on a lot of game design things. He did have some pretty interesting ideas in a general game-theoretical design sense, but I was never that fond of the idea of larding more and more different sorts of mechanics out there and defining a ton of different types of situations like this. Simple generality wins, IMHO. My idea for managing relationships and whatnot is to kind of fuse the SC and disease track ideas together. In fact I consider that a design goal which I haven't dug into yet to just make the two things into one. I mean, basically disease track (and the artifact concordance track, which is basically the same thing if you think about it) is pretty much a FitD 'clock'. So, then there's the question of how to engineer things. Should these things adhere to the general model of an SC with 2 tallies, or should the SC model be restructured so that the 'track' (clock) is basic building block and a classic SC is just an instantiation of that with 2 tracks? The later structure does have the appeal of giving you more options, but then the question becomes why one would use it if the avowed purpose of mechanics is to regulate conflict? I guess you could even further generalize the whole thing as 'resource tracks', and then it could even subsume things like hit points and surges, etc. hmmmmmm. [/QUOTE]
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