NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9094693" data-attributes="member: 82106">That's a characterization of narrativist play which is, at best, misleading. BitD for instance is nothing like this, but the GM is not in charge of making up a scripted set of 'adventures', at all. So any clue you would gain in that game is going to arise out of a player saying something like "I recall that so-and-so often has good information about police investigations, I'll contact him to get some clues." Well, that would, during the info gathering segment of play, trigger a 'fortune roll' where the player will toss some dice against a target number to come up with the information in question. They will have to leverage a contact, RP the actions needed to make the request, and possibly deal with any consequences of failure or something like a devil's bargain that might come up. In any case, the crew gets a finite number of these checks to establish the parameters of whatever score comes out of it, so AT BEST failure here expends a non-renewable resource. BitD is a pretty brutal game! You have limited resources of various types (gold, contacts, allies, equipment, time, rep, etc.) and MANY 'spinning plates' (represented by clocks) to deal with, plus a stress track to manage. NOTHING about this is easy, but the difficulty in this game doesn't focus on mechanical situation-focused GM derived stuff! I guarantee you though, a BitD game run by a smart principled GM is AT LEAST as brutal as any Basic D&D low level dungeon crawler. MORE SO in fact, because in B/X D&D when you get back to town you pretty much just recover, relax, get back your strength and then go again. There's no such cycle in BitD! The pressure is on the PCs ALL the time! You screw up, you are going to be in deep water fast, and chances are you won't recover. You better play well or else!I don't think BitD, for example, has clues like that either. Its just a matter of what the origin of those clues is, and what work they do within the process of developing and revealing the fiction. The locus of challenge in BitD isn't in "deciphering the GM's clues" it is in managing all the resources and crises that are going on in the fiction all the time so as to not get yourselves wiped.Look, there's been dozens of such statements made throughout this thread, and 100 threads before this one. Yet this exact myth constantly gets recycled. I mean, pick up a copy of BitD or DW and try it out. I know you say that you don't like these games, but clearly you haven't actually had any exposure to them at all. You might find it illuminating!</blockquote>

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